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' Tus sueños, prefiero no,' the Mexican prelate said back then when Cy protested his death sentence.

Dreams?

Coming back from the Gents in the Momosa, extremely unsteady, Cy wrapped one arm around each of us and said, 'The best way I can explain my dreams, those sueños, is to say someone has it in for me, and resides in my mind.'

That someone is probably himself, because this intruder has him down cold. Whole drafts of real life slip into his mind during sleep and persist when he wakes up. You want a description? Almost all his notices are adverse. Page after page, read in a book, on sheets of onion-skin paper laboriously written by hand, in newsprint and on billboards, they tell the sorry tale of his misdeeds and lousy performances. His character is scrutinized, anatomized, deplored. These dreams of his—he says they persist—are truly malevolent; they are like 'an embolism in the brain. I get nosebleeds from Rage.' And yes of course he knows Rage is childish; but, as he says, 'I don't have to be told every night that I am heavily involved in lies. I know that.'

I go off to take a leak myself. The main cabin's two toilets are occupied by sub-toddlers having their diapers changed; the spreading butts of two of Cy's older and more motherly grandchildren stick half way out the doors while they attend to the task. My need is urgent, my fly undone, and I clamber down metal steps to the infernal engine room where a stoker hunkers down over a sink-hole in the hot metal flooring. He looks up, paring his toe-nails, and only grunts. Nature then takes its course. For both of us.

By the time I have changed into my only other pair of khakis, repelled the advances of my enamored and greedy cabin steward, and gone back on deck to pick up the rumor of a breeze in the bow, both shore-line and moon have vanished. The sky is murky, he water going by sluggish. Sundry lesser guests, many of them swaying in long white gallabiyas wander by, engulfed in the sweet smoke of hash freely available. I hear someone say, 'It's as though he will go on forever.'

His children may think that, though they would not say it, so it is one of the several hangers-on. I sympathize. If Cy hadn't died many deaths on stage and screen—an immense variety of ends which he made spectacularly sticky—how could you possibly imagine the man on his death bed, the sweet Deirdre, holding his hand and weeping and frowning the way she does when she's perplexed, brushing her immense hair back from her unfathomable eyes. It just wouldn't ring true. I've seen people go; he looks nothing like them. No grope, no self-pity, no rue. He's not even much reduced: in size, in capacity, outrage or loquacity. Has he not always said he knew he would die in 'some stupid accident?

Mid­ships, teetering a bit as if we'd hit a squall of sorts, I see the Blick! lady go by behind Deirdre. She is trying to sneak in a few background tidbits. She presses a button on her little pocket recorder and it squawks on a fast-forward Cy. She presses another and asks Cy's most recent wife, 'Don't you feel sometimes, you could drown in his words?'

Deirdre, I've noted, takes a long time to answer a question the right, inoffensive way. But why should she worry? Mrs. Blick!'s is a common reaction to Cy. He talks. He talks far too much. He talks, he drinks, and when he drinks he talks more. I've seen people cross the street to avoid him. In elevators I've watched them stand so far back from him they are like paper cut-outs pinned to the wall. In restaurants, where he is well-known, people at neighboring tables mutter darkly into their martinis. On the set, with those silly megaphones, directors cry out, 'That's not what Harold (or Eugene or Berthold or Billy) wrote, Cy!' There too he would be holding a glass and radiating bonhomie. And be word-perfect.

I feel sorry for Deirdre. Caught by Frau Blick! unexpectedly, Deirdre, having murmured something amiable enough to Frau Blick!, wanders about the deck abstractly—she is short-sighted—looking for her husband. Her legs are powerful legs, her face is pale and peers out tentatively through her hair, ­a dark red fading into brown, very wild and uncoiffed. I follow her back to the Main Lounge. There, she sits down contentedly. Her husband is not there, but she seems to feel him not far.

Edgar Catch, who plans his own Cy Law tale, has questions of his own. For instance, how does Deirdre shape up to this dynastic celebration, meeting most of Cy's vast family for the first time? How's life with the superannuated, eh? Er. . . Maybe this is not the kind of question I should be answering. Or asking.

At barely thirty, with two unsuccessful marriages behind her, she has been promoted to stage-manager and great-great-grandmother with a sudden infant plopped in her arms. Who knows (certainly not Cy, even if he had been there) which one it is, what it is called? It looks content for now, playing with and trying to get into its mouth a priceless jade collar he gave her ('for the trip, darling'), but where and who is its mother?

Ah, here is Cy: pink-cheeked, refreshed. He spies the sucking infant and puts on his W.C. Fields accent to say, 'Ah, the little chickadee.’ He knows there is a lot a baby can do in thirty seconds. Infants are dangerous. And so are those fierce little engines, the toddlers, who run around under our feet being fire trucks and locomotives.

His own infancy had been perilous. All that imaginative life in a tangle of moist warm bedclothes? Whole islands of dreams—himself the Ruler and in charge of the railway time-table—during those secluded dark nights when the fire-bells rang and Nurse fretted as though he might not still be there in the morning? Studying from a distance the little pink blob in Deir­dre's arms, it amuses him to tell the lifestyle lady from Blick! (Who diligently returns, this time snapping and flashing with her camera) his much-loved story about that Victorian vicar, the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould. The vicar, accosted in his rocking chair by a curly-haired moppet whom he caresses absent—mindedly, asks, 'Pray tell me my dear, whose child are you?' At which point the little girl bursts into tears and says, 'Daddy!’

Frau Blick! is not certain she should laugh.

All that early stuff about Cy's childhood or rather his childhoods—is obviously where I shall shortly begin. You won't find a whole lot about the subject in the half-dozen books—including his own, ghosted by a succession of failed novelists—already written about him. They are nothing much to go on, being mixtures of conjecture, vituperation, sordid detail and dull fact. His own is not much better, being the result of slapdash interviews given the aforementioned novelists and various hacks on Fleet Street, Times Square and so on, a clippings book pasted up. Has Deirdre read them? Can she possibly have believed them? 'Cy Law, A Life in the Stars' makes no mention of Topeka, Kansas, of Oshogbo, the Outback, Buenos Aires or the green waters of the Amazon, except that he toured there or holidayed there. The Cy you may have read about in the fanzines is the Cy Law who is public property, rich and famous enough to do as he pleases.

But as you can tell from his dreams, he both hates and loves (as all actors do) every word written about him, from notices to mentions in gossip columns. These fleeting glimpses of Sir Cy Law seen from the outside are tidbits offered the Public when he is in his cups after a performance, or coming off Imperial Airways' first class. The fact is, as I know, that when he drinks—as he is patently doing now—his languages, words and body, are crescive; they expand to fill the space afforded them. His life rolls out as he imagines it to have been. But about his Real Self, if there is such a thing, he is evasive.

I have a problem with that, particularly with his mother, whose appearances in these so-called tell-all reminiscences are as fleeting as reality. If mentioned at all, she is an American or Irish, dies bearing him, during the Influenza Epidemic of 1919-1920, of cholera on a trip to Darwin, Australia, or in a plane crash is Colombia.

And then there is the way he deals with others: his women, for instance. Several have turned up here in his honor, to hang out with the kids they made for him. They quite rightly find him excessively candid with his biographers and interviewers. The man can and has dis­coursed on almost anything about them. He is an acute observer, so acute that he folds his partners into his own life. He imitates them expertly: their boobs and pantings, the collapse of their soufflés, their accostings, infidelities and most intimate fears have been incorporated into a giant stage hamper. When they appear in the index of these biographies, listed as 'Cy Law, wives', they read those bits, and invariably feel he could have been, should have been, more discreet.

Let it be said, however, that most of them (but not the first) have been accommodating women. The experience of being a Law consort has been worth the entry fee? At least they have a belief in common: every one of them has thought she could alter the man and instead found herself altered by the experience.

As I look around me—his older children ignore me, the younger ones and their families don't know who Edgar Catch is—I see how this vast progeny of his has its own dynamic, ever shifting alliances, competition. The grandchildren, in their thirties and forties, check each other out, wonderingly. The girls tend to be gorgeous. Cy must have gorgeous-female genes. The boys, even generations down, seem to be earnest or charming. With so much to pick and choose among, the question has to be, why does Cy invent, or allow to drift in and out of his life, a dozen others? Such as Madame Xango's descendants, her Tunji, her Lola and the executed Lila, born hither and thither and in and out of wedlock? It's not enough, the life that swirls about him? the internecine quarrels of the various generations; the entrenched interests of the various media conglomerates that own pieces of him; the machinations of his personal 'staff', his secretaries, masseuses, cooks, chauffeurs; the despair of his accountants (these every-five-year binges cost a fortune); the lurks of his spiritual fathers all in severe black; the chorus of the disapproving? He needs more? More of anything? He intends perhaps to breed on the amorous Deirdre?

At the moment, he heeds none of his children or their many munchkins, lights up again, pats Dierdre tenderly on her woolly head on his way by, and then wheels off to talk cunningly to the aged poor relations. His hands waving about in that operatic Italian fashion, half the room can hear him making make angry pronouncements about America, a country he was once much in love with. Just who are these so-called poor relations sitting huddled together in worn-out, old-fashioned suits on a corner rattan divan? The hangers-on? Who are they?

Seen from a distance, he cuts an erect and distinguished figure, seems in fact to have grown a beard and just stepped down, spurs jangling and sword swinging, from a charger; or perhaps about to mount his stallion and be cast in bronze. You would feel the battle-fields at Caporetto and Vittorio Veneto cannot be that far away. He is imperturb­able and in command. Made of the Right Stuff.

As I sidle idly away in search of air not impregnated with roasting aubergines and breasts of lamb, the vessel's captain appears by my side clutching his oily uniform jacket which conceals a priceless bottle of pre-phylloxera claret. 'You want some?' he asks, heading up to the bridge by some rusty stairs.

I follow him and, up on top, think his walk is curiously lop-sided; his right knee curtseys. Is one leg shorter than the other?

Within his lofty cabin, which contains a helmsman in an oversized gallibaya, he takes over the wheel with one hand; the other clutches the bottle with his thumb on its neck. What is it? A Margaux? a Petrus? a Cheval Blanc? I cannot read the label. He produces a tin cup thick with coffee grounds and pours it full. We toss it off.

The view up here is very different, I tell him. Up ahead of us is the freshly painted William Jefferson Clinton. The film crew is up there, plus the producers, the Klein brothers, the director Kim 'Chip' Chong and his assorted Cahiers du Cinéma buddies, chain-smokers to a man. The Bill, as Cy calls the ungainly, tall-stacked vessel up ahead, is air-conditioned. The Mother of the Waters is not. In fact, we drip together on the wheel. As his life drips from his mouth. Thought stirs in him slowly, a spoon in gruel.

He says, 'It is always the same. It is fate. It is decreed that way.’

My Arabic is from books. I don't know how to say simple things. A framed certificate tells me in flowing script that our low-slung barge is called the 'Mother of the Waters’, its tonnage is 1,200 and it is seaworthy. By the time we have emptied the bottle, the name seems fitting. Our vessel steams with a miasma rising off the river at night, a scanty vapor made in part of the smell of cats drowned in bags and that of nasty, somnolent alligators who have digestive tracts just like our own.

Do I mistakenly think it is fun to be a river-boat captain? It might have been at one time, he says: once when all trips began and ended in the elegances that marked the Cairo of yore. In the name of God, the Merciful, blessed be his name, the women were exquisitely dressed, their cleavages, white or dusky, a world of promise; the men wore their smokings to their clubs and played cards or raced fast cars; a man could make his pounds by the hundreds, smoke hashish, be virtuous in prayer, and no one worried that a policeman held in one's arms was an evil to be frowned upon. They are vigorous and strong, lusty men.

Lights, brightly-colored and viscous, quiver in the heavy air before us, casting reflect­ions on the water between the Mother of the Watersand the William Jefferson Clinton. I hear the occasional snap of the tow-rope as it slackens and rises from the surface like a straightened-out snake. The Captain stares straight ahead, full of gloom.

What happened? I ask. The lights form a pattern, writhing in the wake of the William Jefferson Clinton.

The Leader, Gamal Abd el Nasser was what happened, he says. Nasser and his Free Officers raised up from the dung-heaps. 'Since then there is neither honesty nor beauty to be had. The rich live in another world, is that not true?'

'Can you get this old tub to go a little faster? I can't see what's going on over there.'

'You love him?

"Who?'

'Your Sheikh.'

'Sir Cy?'

'Who is the Nubian woman?'

'Sir Cy is an illusion.' What is the Arabic word for a mirage? I have not Arabic enough to explain Madame Xango to the Captain, and he is turned toward me, scrutinizing (It is Fate) my one spare pair of jeans. 'Do you hear music?'

'You are young alongside him. You love him or you do it for money?'

We are going around a slow bend and the lights, as we drift away—too much, I think—towards the river bank, resolve them­selves into a film they are watching on the William Jefferson Clinton. As we close in on them, their screen comes into view and the mirage turns out to be bodies writhing, doubled-over bodies that are shiny as if oiled. They are active and bob. I have no experience of shipwrecks on the Nile, but I am convinced, as the Captain seizes me by the waist, they begin imperceptibly. I therefore cling to the wheel. It spins.

Below us, a voice sings:

Tomo y obligo, mándase un trago
que hoy necessito el recuerdo mata

It is a tango. The record is from long ago, the singer's voice is high, the accompaniment, on guitar and bandoneon, is tinny. He needs a drink to kill memory.

I manage to escape and fumble my way to the lounge, where fans stir the sticky air and children have collapsed in the far corners. Cy, led by Monsignor Moreno, is bent backward. There is a red flower stuck in his ear. He is not Madame Xango, but a memory of her dances and yields as his leg and the Monsignor's interlock.

As I have said, at that point no one has noticed the ship’s list to port. The minor actions of life, those from which consequences emerge (it is Fate), go unnoticed, though not by God, blessed be his name, who watches the fall of the sparrow and the lily of the field.