Lieutenant Mark Vincente

August 21, 1985

I tried to call Violet more times than I can count. Finally, I got the superintendent to let me in. All the windows closed and locked, the loft stifling. I read Violet’s note. At first, the words make no sense. I read it over and over, until they do And yet it still refuses to register in my reeling brain.

I see it now. Or do I? Maybe the paradox is deliberate—without resolution? Is it even possible to believe such things? Violet wrote that there are truths that can never be penetrated, that we can only dance around the magic circle.

Will death resolve them? Violet has told me she is a vessel, as is Khalika, that all that is—all we are—is already written.

I don’t know how to find her. I don’t know where to look. I hope Khalika might do that, in the way only she can. If Violet has given up trying to assert her own will, has chosen death over being subject to Khalika’s, then maybe Khalika will stop her—if only to save herself. Violet said that each depends upon the other.

As for me? I am resigned to the idea that I’m in love with, immersed in, something that is perhaps not Violet—yet must be.

I only know that I’ve been scooped out a second time, the contents hauled away down a river that reflects no light. What is left is a gaping pit, its sides collapsing inward to bury me. Like Violet, I know not what I am, whatever I had been before all this.

The last lines of the note: Si ego non video in hac vita, faciam vos in altera. Non sero.

“If we don’t meet again in this world, I’ll catch you in the next. Don’t keep me waiting.”

I remembered it as the ending line of “Voodoo Child,” a Jimi Hendrix song so chilling, it was always hard for me to listen to. You believed that young, doomed man really could have chopped down a mountain with the edge of his hand, if only his soul could have rested a while longer in its container.

Even now, in this moment, as it all closes in on me, my mind drifts to our last meeting at Fanelli’s. Before I sat down across from Violet, I went over to the jukebox, threw some change in, and punched in some old favorites, the one by Otis Redding, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” I should have asked her to dance. She said we never got to dance, that we should have done that, that she could tell I’d be a good dancer. But I didn’t ask her—not in that moment, not in this lifetime. Maybe in the next one…

I crumple Violet’s note in my hand. I walk slowly to the stove and turn on the burner. I hold it over the flame, watch as the edges of the paper begin to singe, then flare up. Then I drop it into the sink before it can consume whatever is left of me.