36

A house plant gleamed in a clay pot. The dark green foliage, the glaze of salts on the pot, the farmland scent of the potting soil—it was all so out of place where it was, beside a tattered pack of playing cards on a table. The ceiling was sheet rock—a plant has such power that it will ascend even toward a sky of stone.

There was blood on the ceiling. I rose from the rug slowly, section by section, with the movements of an elderly dandy, straightening the crease in my damp trousers, adjusting my cuffs, steadying my head with the gesture of a man with one hand on his hat.

Helen looked on with something like rapture. If I was alive, she knew, then the future held all manner of stunning possibilities. My presence worked in her like oxygen. She wanted to touch me. But at the same time she recognized that there was something grotesque about me, something terrible.

Eric was sweating. He stood with the ax in one fist like a berserker about to jump from a great height. My neck muscles cramped, veins fitfully reasserting themselves. I wavered dizzily, so feeble that my movements were the slow, languid gestures of someone swimming through zero gravity.

When he hefted the ax again, it took me a long time to lift my arm, the deltoid muscles of my shoulders weak, my forearm strengthless. I slipped the blow, and he staggered into it, landing on all fours. The house plant in the corner shook, stem and leaf.

He flung the ax away and scrambled. He snatched something bright off the drenched carpet. The nap of the rug squeaked and squelched under our feet. He passed at my belly with the hunting knife. I saw how he must have borne down on Rebecca, how little she could have guessed about him, how helpless she had felt.

I took him into my arms as the knife slashed me, tearing my shirt, my skin, the muscles of my belly. “Get the ax,” he cried, yelling, full-throated.

He stabbed me, working hard, plunging the knife, ripping my jacket, tangling the blade in the cloth, fumbling, losing it as it tumbled to the floor. He told her to pick the ax off the floor. “Use the ax.”

I laughed, a little sadly. I had wanted an adversary.

“His legs,” he was gasping. “Hit him in the legs.”

We rocked in a silent waltz. He had been young once. Music had meant so much to him. But he had always been coarsened by ambition, stubborn in ways that made him tireless when he should have rested, industrious when he should have walked beside the river, watching the leaves turn from green to scarlet with something almost audible, that sound like held breath.

He knew this now: he had hurried to the bulletin board, across the plaza with its red and white umbrellas, the pigeons, the white crumbs of bread. He wanted to see the scores, to see where his name appeared on the roster of the gifted.

He was not the first human being to want too much. He fought me, fists, kicks, with all the loud bravado of a theatrical double, a man pretending to be in danger, miming a death-struggle, his voice draining to a shrill, piping No.

He was senseless when I killed him, unpacking his body of its organs with the careful concentration I would have used on a trunk full of curiosities, heart, lungs, the pipes and ducts of food and air, until there was so little left of the living man, so little structure, that I had to stop my dismantling and attend to her.

She was crouched at the door of the bathroom, and continued to scream when I touched her cheek soothingly. What she had just seen had broken through her joy at my presence.

There was nothing I could do to quiet her, so I pressed my fingers over her eyes and told her to sleep. I draped her over the quilt on her bed, a sailboat pattern, an heirloom, beautiful, stitch by stitch.

The children hid in the bathtub. They wore pink pajama bottoms, and each wore a T-shirt representing a superhero.

Sleep. I did them no harm. Their bodies were warm in my arms as I carried them one by one to the bedroom, toys all over the floor and a few ants around the sticky half circle left by a can of cola.

And now, Rebecca would say, you are going to turn yourself in. Now you will call Dr. Opal.

Because it was over. I had accomplished everything I had set out to do.

I wiped blood off the phone with a paper towel and told the operator I wanted to speak with Berkeley Chief of Police Joe Timm. Instead I was connected to the Berkeley Police Department, a woman’s voice.

It was only after persisting and getting the answering machine in Joe Timm’s private office that I remembered a fragment of a phone number. I tried various combinations of digits, and when I heard Joe Timm’s voice at last I felt a flicker of satisfaction.

This was miles from Joe’s jurisdiction, but he would know what to do. “I found Eric,” I said.

“Eric,” he said, almost guessing what I was talking about, almost recognizing my voice. “Who is this?”

“He killed Rebecca,” I said.

“Where are you?” said Joe, mystified, but thinking fast.

Joe was asking questions as I put the receiver down beside an ashtray, a bowl of blue glass. The sound of his tiny, electrified voice followed me until I was outside. I washed myself with a garden hose, but the effort wasn’t really necessary. Even my appearance seemed to regenerate, my clothing healing as inexorably as my flesh.

As I turned off the water, twisting the handle of the garden faucet, a woman stepped out of the shadows, a man behind her. “We heard noises,” said the woman. “We almost called the police.”

“Yes, it was a little noisy in there, wasn’t it?” I said. The melancholy I should have expected was setting in. I could stop now—stop everything, and step off this one-man merry-go-round. I had done everything I wanted. I could wait here for the call to be traced, for the police to roll up and take me in.

Neither of the neighbors were afraid. They were dazzled by my smile, trusting me to join them, go with them back into their bungalow. “We just wondered if everything was alright,” said the woman, softening her voice seductively. Her accent reminded me of Connie’s, a country twang modified by years of watching television.

“Everything is all right,” I said.

I liked these people, the man in a baseball cap and jeans, the shapely woman in a plaid blouse. I could go back and play Scrabble. They would have been delighted to let me win, letting me make up words, all x’s and q’s, and for a while I even walked back with them the woman taking my arm, leaning close to me, the man trailing, honored by my attraction for his wife, willing to participate in a night of voluntary cuckoldry, watching George Raft talk tough while I took my pleasure in the bedroom. And I nearly walked up the steps with them, almost closed the door behind me.

But I knew what Rebecca would tell me. I knew I had lied to myself. I was not going to let the authorities take me in. There would be no audiences, no foreign experts. No release from my condition. I no longer wanted answers. This was what I loved—this minute linked to minute, this power to endure. I wanted more of this, night after night just like this one, two people standing close to me, offering me their lives.