Lazarus, after three days “under the enigmatical sway of death”, inexplicably returns to the community of the living. He is received with great joy – and indiscretion. At a “welcome home” party thrown in his honor, a guest asks several times what being dead was like and receives no answer. But the other guests begin to fear their host without knowing why, and one by one they take their leave (As his own household does, in less than the fullness of time).

The narrator tells us that Lazarus “brought something back with him from the other side”. He who in (former) life was affable and fond of jokes is now taciturn, expressionless, indifferent to everything. Indeed his experience has literally transformed him. Visible are bluish, running to deep violet creases in his flesh between his fingers and around his eyes – which seem sunken, their pupils a flat, fathomless black. His body has acquired a sort of uncanny stoutness, perhaps bloated in arrested decomposition. As time passes, Lazarus sits in his house without heat, without light and, but for one occasion, without company. A bored sculptor of beautiful bodies hears of him and requests his hospitality. Sitting in the silence and the dark, the sculptor asks, with growing unease, if Lazarus might have at least somewhere a bottle of wine. Time passes and darkness spreads when Lazarus answers: "I was dead". The guest takes his leave of Lazarus and his happiness on the same morning. Upon his return to decadent Rome, he completes one last work which inspires horror in his admirers, who urge him to destroy it.

Lazarus, the staring abyss, the walking lazaretto, is shunned by men. The peasants speak of tying bells to him to give warning of his approach (this is rejected in that these bells heard approaching in the night might ring grim portent), even of killing him. But this, even Augustus dares not do.

Lazarus leaves his house during the day to wander into the desert and stare at the sun. One day he is summoned by Caesar to Rome. Caesar, game to every challenge, desires audience with this messiah of despair. The imperial lackeys were able to rouge over the terrific pallor, to paint on the lines of a faint smile, but they could not mask his annihilating gaze. And even Augustus the bold is lost to its venefice. In Lazarus's gaze he scries empires not yet founded in ruins, cerements woven from the swaddling prepared for infants already in the tomb... life crawling from the ocean depths toward the sun and into the black vastation of time (like Bede's bird). In Bede and Pascal, life was depicted as a bright interruption of an engulfing infinite dark. But Lazarus was dead. He stares at the improbable sun, which, like Atlas, holds the unbegotten from the obliterated, himself inhumed in and host to the maggot of decay.

Lazarus, escorted out of the eternal city, his eyes seared out of his skull by a horrified Emperor, again follows the sun into the desert and disappears - absorbed, or dead, never seeing, never seen again. ( )