PALE LIGHT CAME SLOWLY AS I SAT ALONE WITH MY COFFEE. I did not delve into my feelings or my mind. I had no inclination to do so, and I knew that there was no real understanding to be had by such delvings.

The Ch’an Buddhists had known the truth. Thought was the great curse. Only when the mind was free of it could the power of no-thought bring the burning flame of being. Those who seek truth should realize that there is nothing to seek.

Faustus dismissed all Christian theology with the words: “What doctrine call you this? / Che sera sera, / ‘What will be shall be?’ Divinity, adieu!”

Yes, I reflected, before there was Doris Day, there was Faustus. And before there was Faustus, there were the Ch’an masters who knew that what Faust sought did not exist.

The coffee grew cold in my cup, and I drank the last of it and just sat there.

I had killed. I had killed without even really knowing it. I felt no remorse. Maybe a cheap metaphysical Hallmark sympathy card cast to the wind with scant emotional postage; nothing more. There was no sin in killing. Like the rest of the Ten Commandments, it was merely a reflection of man’s fearful desire to protect himself by transferring to the supreme authority of an imagined God decrees against those things that man feared—being murdered; being robbed; having his wife fuck around; and so on—that consigned them to the realm of “sin” and the punishment of eternal damnation, the “Che sera sera” that Marlowe put in the mouth of his Faustus.

There was no morality. There was no sin. There was only fear.

Given the chance of returning to the moments before I had killed, would I do it again? But there was no going back. Never.

All I knew at this moment was that my abhorrence for the woman in my bed was so intense that I could easily kill her—were she not in my bed, in my home; were it not that there were others who had seen us together, who suspected or knew that we were lovers.

Thou shalt not get caught. The unwritten commandment, the palimpsest on the unseen side of the tablet. Again, there was only fear.

Then she was standing before me, in my robe, smiling with eyes still adrift with sleep. She was no longer the beautiful girl who had sated my cravings, the goddess whom I had loved. She was a detested creature, alien to me.

“Get that off,” I told her, gesturing to my robe. “Put your own shit on. Then get the fuck out of here. I don’t want to see you ever again.”

She looked at me, stunned, the sleep gone from her eyes, her jaw lowered, slowly, remotely, as if it were a motion apart from her brain signals, beyond her consciousness.

“What?” she demanded. She had heard and comprehended my words and their stern seriousness. Her question was not a question. It was a delayed articulation of shock. She stared into my eyes. I do not know what she saw. Her stare did not waver, as if she were intent on discerning another to emerge through my eyes. Then she turned away and began to sob.

“Turn off the waterworks, baby, they don’t move me no more.”

I knew her sobbing was an overture to anger, and I would have none of it. I went to the basket of umbrellas in the nook beside my stacked washing machine and dryer, near my front door. There it was, among the umbrellas, seventeen inches of pure heavy iron: a twelve-inch length of black iron pipe connected firmly by an inch-and-a-half Ward-threaded black iron coupling to another three and a half inches of black iron pipe affixed to a blunt black iron cap. An inch in diameter, the four base inches of the pipe were wrapped tight in McMaster-Carr grip tape for a perfect grasp. It was good to have friends who were plumbers and boiler men.

I raised it out, wrapped my hand fast around the grip, went back to where she stood, swung it sideways, and rapped her in the ass with just enough force for the iron cap to send a deep, long-lasting, and painful bruise through the fat of her buttock.

As I did this, she shrieked, flinched, and struck out all at once. Thus one of her flailing forearms was also none the better for the blow.

“You’re crazy,” she exclaimed in a high, panicky voice as she cowered away from me. “You sick fucking monster! You really are crazy.” She placed her hand where she had been struck. Her face was contorted with wincing and crying and who knew what else. She ran to the bedroom. Shit, I thought suddenly, what if she knows where the gun is? But I did not hear the closet being opened. I glimpsed her pulling off my robe and throwing it to the bed, then gathering up her clothes.

I sat there, the pipe in one hand, a cigarette in the other. It hit me. This bitch is going to make a report at the First Precinct. I took a drag. So what if she did? I had asked her to leave. She had refused. That made her a trespasser. And besides, she’d never get a hospital report of any use out of this. A bruise on her ass, maybe her forearm; no big deal. Shit, a bruise on her ass. The fucking cops would spit out their coffee trying not to laugh. And if she pulled down her britches for the doctor, how would she ever explain away the telltale signs of our blood-play? Nah, fuck it, she wasn’t going anywhere, except away from here. Still, I figured, it would be best to disassemble the pipe in my hand and put the two lengths and the connector in different places. I would ditch the cap that had left its mark on her ass. I could always pick up another at the hardware store for a couple of bucks, maybe less.

Then something else came to mind, but I was quickly reassured to see that her bag, as usual, was on the easy chair across from the couch where I was sitting. I peeked in, and there it was: that gizmo of hers, that smartphone, or handheld device, or whatever the fuck they called it. Good. That meant she wasn’t in the bathroom or crouched in a far corner of the bedroom melodramatically whisper-calling or e-mailing or texting or tweeting or twittering or Facebooking or pressing little red all-points bulletin buttons or whatever the hell else these people did.

She stood before me, and she no longer showed any fear. She turned, shouldered her bag, then turned to once again stare into my eyes.

“I’ll always love you,” she said. She said it as one might say words over the dead.

Sarah fucking Bernhardt.

She forgot to fake a limp until she was almost halfway to the door. Then she was gone.

I poured a glass of cold milk and took a Valium. I breathed deeply. My pulse was calm. My mind was as placid with no-thought as ever I had known it to be.

Melissa had meant the world to me. I had come to hate the world. In casting her away, I had cast away the world that I despised. I felt free. I felt great.

Yes, fuck the living. Fuck the dead. Fuck the world and all that lies beyond.