The Doll was very close now. She dropped her finger to the trigger, took up the tension. She wouldn’t miss. She wouldn’t mess up. She had fifteen rounds saved from Srebrenica. Fuck Srebrenica! Fuck terrorists! Fuck this world!
She felt in control. The Doll realised that she hadn’t really known she was alive until she had felt bad enough to want to kill. How was it possible to say that being a murderer or a terrorist is something in this world now, but being the Doll was dying over and over? That she had been shut out of this world, so she had made another world? That when love is not enough, what else can someone do?
Maybe guns allow a way back, thought the Doll. Maybe this is what people do when they get written out of this world, when they get turned upside down and remade into something people can only hate, into something people become afraid of, into something no longer themselves. Maybe that’s all anybody’s got left. It’s not right and it’s not enough, she thought, but then what is right and what is enough?
She could hear Wilder telling her how you can have anything you want, only you have to pay the price. No one was going to pay the price for the Doll, no politician or journalist was going to speak for her. And all she had to speak with, to pay up with, was Moretti’s Beretta. It would help make it clear, if only for a split second before the trigger eased back and the chamber emptied, that she was herself and not an invention, a prejudice, a label.
It was strange to her that he—who had said the worst things about her, who had called her a killer and an inhuman monster—did not know what she was going to do next. The Doll knew that she would never do so human a thing again in her life. It was all good. She raised the Beretta into view.
“Krystal?” said Richard Cody. Yes, he thought, that was her name.
BLAM! went the gun. Richard Cody’s chest tore open, his right arm kicked up and out, and he fell backwards. Someone screamed.
The Doll’s eyelids were wet with sweat. She was very weary and wished to sleep. But she had things to do. In that quiet that follows catastrophe the only sound was something scratching frantically beneath her.
She looked down.
It was Richard Cody on his back on the floor, his feet flailing as he wildly attempted to push his body away. But his body wasn’t moving. All she could see were escaping rays of bright red sun. They shone in splatters and specks on people’s clothes. With her free hand she flicked the sweat out of her smarting eyes, then brought it back to the pistol. Then she could no longer hear her own heart banging, nor Richard Cody’s feet scratching away. All the Doll could hear in her mind was Chopin. She knew he understood. She could explain none of it.
The Doll took two steps closer to where Richard Cody lay squirming on the ground. He reminded her of an upturned cockroach attempting to writhe away, with his limbs jerking, his repulsive fingers twitching. Though his tinted eyes danced with terror, his strange face remained oddly frozen, like an insect’s. As the piano rose to its final notes, other sounds began coming back—screaming, shouting—and she could feel the pressure of the Beretta’s trigger again growing as she brought the gun close to his head and once more eased her finger back.