44

My handwriting had never looked quite this elegant, each letter an example of penmanship. It scarcely looked like my handwriting at all. I was dressed, feeling crisp. A pair of my great-grandfather’s gold cufflinks made a rodent-tiny rustle against the paper.

There was another, similar sound in the room—the gold nib of my pen against the paper. I was writing a letter to Fern’s sister, retired and living in Toms River, New Jersey. It expressed, in phrases millions of people had used before me, my honest condolences. I sealed the letter and pressed it carefully, as though my state of mind might cause it to become unglued, to become unwritten, to make the entire communication vanish.

I was anything but mournful. Fern had lived, and he had died. The writing of the letter struck me as quite remarkably absurd for a moment. But I knew that it was important to continue to behave like a normal man.

I had another bit of paper that required a personal check and a postage stamp: a bill from a towing company. The armored Mercedes was in a foreign auto salvage yard in South San Francisco. I understood debts.

My neck was sore. I was stiff. My tongue, too, was still healing from its cut. But I did not feel badly injured. Any sense of regret was fading in me. What was given to me in the place of conscience was the keenest sensation of being alive.

They must not know. They must not be able to see by looking at you what has happened.

“You look so well,” said Collie. “Despite everything.”

She said this with a tone of approval. Grief had always been well hidden by my father, tucked in and knotted, dressed in wellcut worsted. And yet what I felt could not be called grief.

Your body is a disguise. Your feelings are relics.

“Despite everything indeed,” I said. But it was not simple happiness that made me feel clear-headed.

“Black doesn’t look good on some people,” she said, pouring my coffee.

“I’ve always admired black,” I said. “Not over other colors. The other colors are more lovely. But black gives the figure a certain definition. It gives everything definition, don’t you think? Light contrasting with dark.”

“I really can’t say, but I’ve always liked colors, myself, a little foolishly, I suppose. I always liked the greens and the oranges.”

“You’re a cheerful person, Collie,” I observed.

“I do appreciate you saying so.”

“How do you stay so happy?”

“My sister wonders the same thing. Sisters aren’t always alike, you know. She’s the one who worries. Watches the news and can’t sleep. It’s a habit, really. Or a gift, if you like. But you certainly look pleased with things this morning, if I may say so.”

This morning my hands had, quite without conscious guidance on my part, selected black trousers, a midnight-blue tie, and a black jacket. I watched myself butter toast with a detached interest. I wasn’t hungry, but I ate because that’s what a normal man does. He chews, he sips coffee.

What is our old friend Stratton Fields going to do today?

I should be taking notes. Something for a PBS special: what it’s like to have no soul.

Forget the latest fad in recreational chemicals, the latest sex manual, the latest computerized reality. Let’s check in with a man who has traded his soul for—for what?

Tell us, Mr. Fields—what did you get in exchange for your soul?

Well, for one thing, it turns out I can get away with murder.

Quite literally. And the odd thing is that I like it.

That’s fascinating. And what else have you noticed about yourself?

The Children’s Hospice had never been so small, and the light there had never been so dim before. The door swung shut behind me.

I thought: He simply has to be here, still, in his usual bed.

But the place had changed. Nona’s ward had never resembled a hospice when she was in it. With her presence it had transformed from a hospital wing of children not expected to recover to a place of life, the kind of classroom that is a joy.

The pictures she had pinned to the bulletin board were still there. They were the artwork done by the children themselves, red, scraggly suns, big-eyed, lively humans with stick arms and legs, the style of drawing that children take to with pleasure.

The bright colors and the spritely figures announced to the viewer that the world was a place to stir the hand to take up the crayon and the chalk and try to get it all on paper—for fun, as an act of purest happiness.

I hurried down the corridor, my shoes squeaking on the freshly waxed surface.

To my relief, Stuart was there, turning his head to see who was at the door. His eyes brightened. His face wrinkled into a smile, and he held out his hand to me, and I took it. His hand was thinner than before.

Picking the right words might prove difficult, I thought. To speak would be to talk about Nona, and about her absence.

He touched a bead of water on my raincoat. He said, “Dr. Lyle is sick.”

“Very sick,” I agreed.

“Everything will be fine when she gets back,” he said.

Stuart looked away, up at the television. The silent set was a cartoon, multicolored androids of some kind locked in conversation, the animation jerky, nothing moving but the robot mouths.

Stuart stirred in his bed, as he often did during a visit, impatient, perhaps, with lying down, or with the feel of the sheets over his body. “I ate all my JELL-O,” he said.

I told him that this was good news.

I had picked out some special paper on leaving the studio in my house, a French drawing paper from a shop on rue du Bac, and I folded it carefully, slowly, into one of my puppets. It began, of course, as a stallion, but ended looking, after I tore one of its ears clumsily, and then botched the other, like a horse wanting to transform into a creature that could fly, a beast with talons and a beak.

Its ears looked like feathers standing forth along its neck, so I made a few more such feathers. I told Stuart that it looked more like a bird than a horse, and he said, “A flying horse.”

“Possibly.”

“I liked your other horses better.”

“This one looks strange doesn’t it?”

“A little bit,” said Stuart, dismissive but kind.

His bed was nearly covered with comic books; muscular, Vikingesque men battling metallic monsters, steel-clad creatures with pincers and hooks for limbs battling deathray-blasting titans. The epic battles looked both exciting and unimaginable, a boy’s universe.

Do this child a favor. Smother him.

I made another puppet, a well-turned horse, and Stuart laughed. He took it from me, and we made a little game of mock combat, the two horses outbiting each other.

But he was tired. There was no doubt that he had lost more weight, and the whites of his eyes were slightly yellow. I stood, ready to leave. In a sleep-heavy voice he said, “I had a dream about you.”

Do it. Kill him now. You believe in mercy, don’t you?

“I’ll have to hear about it sometime,” I said.

“You were in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“You were hanging off a mountain.”

“Off of a cliff?”

“Off a cliff,” he agreed.

This story, idle as it had seemed, did not please me when I stopped to think about it. “What happened?”

“I had wings,” he said.

“That’s sounds like fun.”

“I saved you,” he said, sleepily.

I offered to turn off the television, but he did not seem to hear me, only holding on to my hand as he turned away and drifted off, his lips moving, like the lips of the creatures still offering what looked like taunts or threats to each other on the screen.

One of the nurses was at the doorway as I turned to leave, and I wondered if perhaps she had been warned to keep me away from the children.

“It’s so good to see you, Mr. Fields,” she said. “The children ask after you when you don’t come. Especially now.”

It would be an act of mercy to kill them all.

“I really had to stop by and see them. I think about them all the time,” I heard myself say, with the smooth tone of a diplomat, an accomplished actor, a liar.

“Do stop by again. Stuart asks for you.”

I found myself lingering in a corridor. I urged myself to go and see Nona. To say good-bye.

To take her life.

Go back and show her mercy, too.

I stood there, breaking into sweat. Just a few quick steps to the stairway, just a quick walk across these polished tiles. Why did I hesitate?

Kill Nona.