SIN, DEATH, AND THE MASK

He sat in a wooden, straight-backed chair and leaned over the small table.  He took up one of the 

pencils and began to write.  The room was brightly lit from a fixture directly above. He wrote quickly, 

as though what he had to say was boiling up in him:

I take full responsibility, how could I not?  She was dear to me and the pain of her loss is more than I can describe.  I am terribly, terribly sorry for what happened.  Though I know that will not mean much.  Nothing I say can exculpate me, nothing reduce the guilt, and nothing make the pain any less.  There is no why, because there is no understanding  of what happened.  But it is my fault, and I take full responsibility. 

He had pushed heavily on the pencil writing the word “full” in the last sentence.  Then he paused, looked at the page, the top one of a yellow pad, and scribbled over the paragraph, over and over, scribbling it out.  He put the pencil crossways in his mouth, crunched heavily on it, and stared down at the pad.  Then he took the pencil in hand again and began to write immediately under the scribbled out paragraph:

As the thirty or so pigeons banked westward in a tightening flock, the tops of their wings and their backs flashed golden pink in the long slanting rays of the setting sun.

Yes, he would begin here, just before it happened.  If he told it that way, told it as it unfolded, even if no one believed him, it would be there, the truth, and he could rest in it, whatever came afterwards.  He could rest in it and accept whatever came afterwards:

They swung swiftly out of sight half a moment after I stepped outside.  Dusk was already taking the ground, and the street was heavily shaded and dark under the trees.  The tops of a row of billowy cumulus clouds filling the eastern sky were shining gloriously, while their undersides were purple black.  As I gazed at them, the pigeons came swinging from the north, but instead of banking west as they came over, as before, they cut eastward and passed darkly under the clouds.  The sun this time ignited their soft bellies as they arced upward, and their wings stroked into and out of the light, creating a flickering which I couldn’t help but to watch.  The birds were trying to land, but high trees on the edges of the yard, a block down, where their coop was, complicated their approach, and as they came among them, they scattered this way and that, and, unsuccessful, took noisily to the air again.  The air was warm for February, and the ground was clear already of snow and dry.  I was in shirtsleeves and slippers, standing on the deck, smoking a cigarette.   The days were lengthening, and I could hear in the sabbath quiet of the evening the high thin whine of truck tires coming from the Interstate, two miles south.

     A moment longer the tops of the eastern clouds shone, and then their brightness began to fade and their color deepen, and I could feel the change as a bodily sensation.  It was a sensation, not an emotion—a  sensation as of something passing into oblivion, and there was left only the uniformity and equality of all things in the dark.  But it was not yet dark, and the pigeons were still trying to land.  The whole character of being had changed from one pass of the birds to next, and I wondered if they saw it too, or if they felt the oncoming dark only as an increased urgency to land.  Could they not have been sensitive to how the light played on them as they swung through the sky?  Did it gladden them? 

     This past month I buried my mother.  I have a sister who lives in Los Angeles, but I seldom see her.  She has her own life and I suppose she thinks of me as often as I think of her.  She’s just another absence.  But as I stood on the deck and watched the night come, I thought of her and was filled with all the familiar unanswerable questions.  My mother’s stone-like and expressionless face came to me, and I felt that sensation again.  This time as an imponderable horror.  For a few moments, the clouds, the birds, the light, the air, even the far-away whine of the Interstate, shone, and shone intensely.  And I shone too as part of it.  What did it mean?  Can it be that it means nothing?  But if it means nothing, why do people have it in them to be moved by it?  There are two parts making up a whole. . .but at the recollection of my mother’s face, I felt blocked.

     I felt, also, sad, the same sadness I felt at her graveside.  It was a feeling I couldn’t make go away, though sometimes it was less.  When I was in the grip of it, it made me gentle.  I would look at my students’ faces and see in them the unacknowledged anguish of unknowing.  But that evening I stayed on the deck, smoking, until dusk turned to dark and the lights inside cast their yellow glow on the grass.

At this point he put the pencil down.  He was sitting at the table facing the open door that looked onto the corridor, at the end of which was the police dispatcher’s office.  He was left alone with the writing pad and the pencils.  He had admitted to the killing already and, waiving his rights, agreed to write a confession, whereupon the detective brought him to the room and then stepped out.  He had been writing for about fifteen minutes.  He could hear the voices of police officers on the dispatcher’s radio and he could hear her, the dispatcher’s, codified responses.  They hardly ever spoke in complete sentences, and he felt a surreal dreaminess come over him. 

He read what he had written so far.  It was going to take a long time to get to it, but none of it would make sense if he didn’t explain.  Explain.  No.  There was no explaining.  Even though that was what he was doing, if only to himself.  He couldn’t explain.  None of it made sense.  He could only describe.  He didn’t understand any of it himself.  Maybe, if he kept at it, it would begin to make sense. . .but just then the detective looked in.

     “Are you done?” he asked.

     “No,” he said, feeling sad and alone and out of touch and afraid.  The feelings crowded his heart and made him sit back and breathe deeply.  But the detective was unsympathetic and said gruffly, “How much longer?  Get on with it, we don’t have all day.”  He stepped away from the door again:

She was inside sipping wine, lounging on the couch.  She was beautiful.  She was like the evening light I was so moved by out on the deck.  As dusk turned to dark, I felt the same darkness growing in myself.  It was no good anymore, and I knew we would quarrel because of the mood I was in.  I didn’t want to quarrel, because she was the only person who stood between me and the melancholy I was feeling almost all the time, except when I was with her.  I waited until it got dark.  Then I went in to tell her I didn’t feel well.

     She loved me.  Did I love her?  Given the circumstances I was enduring in those moments, I don’t think I was capable of loving.  The light that evening moved me out of myself, I felt a union with it, or rather, a union with all that it touched, even though it didn’t touch me.  It came inside me through my knowing and shone in me, so that I might have resembled a light bulb.  But all that passed by the time I went in.  What remained was a deeper sadness than I was accustomed to. 

     A moment ago I said that she was beautiful.  That she was like that evening light. She was, to me.  Though maybe not to others.  She had acne scars on both cheeks.  Little pock marks like craters that made the curves of her cheeks resemble the moon, especially with all the powder she put on them.   She also had thick pale lips, a wide nose, bushy blond eyebrows—why didn’t she pluck them?—and coarse blond hair that she combed straight down and which was very unattractive to look at.  Altogether, with the horn-rimmed glasses she wore, she was not attractive at all.  She was rather ugly.  Her name was Lisa, and she had a powerful hold on me.

After my mother died, I couldn’t be alone anymore.  I was never a sociable person, and I had no network of friends or associates.  As a college professor, I was independent—as few people are now-a-days—needing to rely only on my own preparations to do my job.  Until now, I preferred this autonomy at work and the solitude of my home, which my mother seldom intruded upon.  But I had begun to feel differently after seeing my sister off at the airport and finding myself in an empty house.  I had put on the stereo, and the music only made the house seem strange, for it was as out of place as I had begun to feel; I had no emotional connection to anything anymore.  As a bachelor, I had a good arrangement.  My mother cooked and cleaned and looked after my comforts, and in return she had the security of decent living.  In the end, I nursed her through the worst of it.  When it was all over, I found I had no life to return to.  No life with people, that is.  I began to understand how necessary to sanity, to one’s ability to cope with daily needs, another person is.  Any other person.

So I began to look for things to do, to feel connected—to something, anything—as a fix for the melancholy.  What I wanted was sex.  Now she was gone.  Not in this town, though, because I dreaded being seen by people who knew who I was, but about an hour’s drive from here—that’s where I went.  There were strip bars there.  Never having been to such places, I thought they would distract me enough that they might be a good remedy for the condition I was in.  I would have a couple of drinks, and, sometimes, even, talk to the ladies.  I was amused by them.  As one could well imagine from the intellectual environment I cultivated—as among the last of a breed who defended an academic order rapidly dilapidating—that was my nature, to be a defender of order under siege—oh, this revealed itself in many ways; I offended everyone I could, especially at conventions, where my views were the target others trained their sights on.  I suppose I was useful, but off the podium no one spoke to me.  Colleagues kept their distance as though I were a pariah, little recognizing what piranhas they were themselves. 

At one moment, in the intense glare of floodlights that bleached her flesh white as paper, one of these women would be grinding and sweating on the platform amid the catcalls of the heated men and their hoots and shouts; the next, she would be sitting at the bar, dressed like anybody else, yaking away.  It amused me.  This is how I met Lisa.  I noticed from the first that she had a musky odor.  She would come down from her floodlit heights, put on a robe, go into the dressing room, where, presumably, they had no shower for the women, and emerge fifteen minutes later.  One night she came and sat by me and we talked.  That’s when I noticed the odor.  The other girls smelled sweaty.  She smelled musky.  I found it interesting.  Before long we became friends. 

What did women like these grind experts talk about?  I was curious about that.  When I first started coming, I would watch these women sitting at the bar.  They always had three or four guys at their elbows buying them drinks.  I wondered what they talked about—there seemed no end to the gab; so I got close and listened.  I didn’t expect to hear them holding forth about Fidel Castro and Pope John Paul, about the death of Communism, the Eurodollar and the emerging globalization of the world’s economy.  No.  I didn’t expect that.  But they didn’t talk about sex, either; about the grind and heave, and doing it at three a.m. on the sidewalk in front of the jewelry store.  Sometimes one’s mind can’t help but to run in grooves.  It was more disappointing, even, than I expected.  They talked about their favorite movies, about Leo and Kate, and Gwyneth Paltrow, about hip hop, and their brothers’ football games, and Michael Jordan, Dennis Rodman, about making millions, spending millions—the endless, dreary, narcotizing hum of American life, no different here than anywhere.

Lisa was different.  The first time she sat by me, she turned those heavy brows into visible thoughts.  “Seeing a woman’s naked body,” she said meditatively, starting the conversation, “is better than a double scotch and soda for lifting a man out of the doldrums.”  She said that with a sense of mission in her eyes.  “A lady with purpose,” I thought.

“You looked great,” I said, tongue tied, not knowing how to make bar talk.

“Thanks,” she smiled.  But then she said, “I noticed you.  I tried to make eye contact with you because you looked so uncomfortable at the bar, like you were ashamed.  But your eyes were glued to my boobs.  I shook them at you, God, three times, at least.  Did you notice that?”

“No,” I said, charmed by her frankness and her sense of mission concerning me.  “I’m kind of new at this.  I probably was squirming.  You’re right.”

The detective stepped into the little room and looked at the numerous pages he had written.  He said, irritably, “What’s taking so long?  What the hell are you writing, a biography?  Let me see what you’ve done.”

     He took the pad, turned back the pages, and began to read.  After a few minutes, he dropped the pad on the table and said, “None of this is to the point.  You’re writing a confession for the prosecutor not a priest.  No one’s interested in this stuff.”

     “I could just write, ‘I did it,’ and sign it.  But that wouldn’t be explaining what happened.”

     “Look,” the detective said derisively, “that’s all we’re interested in.  So just write it that way, like you said, and be done with it.” 

     The detective was an experienced man.  He was short, blond, wore small, round lenses in a thin wire frame, and had a bushy beard.  He was well known in the county and respected.  When he came to the house and saw the bizarre way the woman had been killed, he knew he had a case with a lot of potential to arouse the press, and he was determined to button down the facts before things got out of hand.  The last thing he wanted was a story whose complexities invited all sorts of frenzied speculation from all sorts of people.  This guy is simply a murderer, he thought; everything about him betrays that fact; that’s how the press should see it, and that and only that is what the confession should establish.

     “Start over,” he said.  “Just say what you did, say when, say why if you can do that in one sentence.  Then sign it.  You’ve been here an hour now.”

     “But that’s not what I want to do.”

     “Listen, you waived your rights, you admitted doing it, you said you wanted to write a confession.  We didn’t ask you to do any of this.  Now, if you want a lawyer, fine.  We’ll get you one, or you can call one.  Either way, you’re going to the security facility now.  Unless you want to write the confession, not the biography.  I’ll give you ten more minutes.  What’ll it be?”

     “If you take me now, can I have the writing pad, take it with me to the cell?  I’m writing the confession, but I’m going to do it my own way.  Otherwise, we’ll do as you say and call a lawyer.”

     “Fine,” the detective said.  “Let’s go.”  He took him by the arm, stood him up, and walked him into the corridor.  Two officers came suddenly from the room just across and cuffed his hands and shackled his feet.  One put a chain around his waste and hooked the cuffs to it.  They led him out of the station and put him in a car.  He was relieved to see one of the policeman held the yellow pad and the pencils and put them on the seat between himself and the driver.

     They drove the half mile to the large Public Safety Center where the jail was.  The car stopped beside a single door on the far south side of the huge building.  Someone opened it and stepped out, holding the door.  A uniformed policeman came out, opened the car door and reached in to assist him getting out.  The shackles on his ankles had a long enough chain for him to walk naturally only if he took small steps, so the man who helped him get out and the two officers who drove with him walked together at his pace.  Once inside, they unshackled him and removed the cuffs, led him down a brightly lit corridor, through another door, and into the cell block area.  There was a large cell on the left with several men in it, and he hoped they would not deposit him there.  The lighting was dimmer all around and there were no windows. 

They stopped in front of the large cell, which was apparently a holding cell where men waited while the law was deciding what to do with them.  But the officer who helped him get out of the car opened the cell on the right, which was a small one-man cage, about nine feet by nine, with a toilet in one corner and a cot along the wall.  He stepped in, and as he turned, his heart racing, the officer who had carried the yellow pad and pencils into the car put these items into his hands.  He felt tremendous relief.  They were going to let him write the confession after all.  He felt better, though he felt, at the same time, a hollowness in his stomach that he knew was fear.  What made him feel it was the strange quietness of the three officers.  Not one of them spoke, neither to him nor to each other.  Whether it was the solemnity of the occasion that muffled their naturalness or just a rule not to talk in the presence of a prisoner he didn’t know.  But the silence was, more than anything else, terrifying. 

The officers left and he heard the shaft in the doorlock plunge into place.  He had not moved since taking the pad and pencils, and now he focused on the men in the large cell.  They, too, were quiet, and they were paying no attention to him.  They had, apparently, seen enough of him as he entered to have whatever curiosity they might have had satisfied, and now they were once again absorbed in their own situations.  It was eerie.  He dreaded the sound of a voice.  The hollowness of fear in his stomach deepened and deepened, like a hole being dug by a faceless shadow.  The whole cell block having no windows, he felt like he was locked in a tomb.  Numbness came over him.  All he could do was sit on the cot: 

“What you want,” I said to Lisa, speaking of people generally, though, of course, meaning her, “is the warmth of another’s awareness—to be included in it unrejectingly and unconditionally.  God knows what happens to us when we don’t know that, especially as children.  We lose it, though, as a natural consequence of growing up, and we spend much of our lives searching for it again.”

It was the second or third time she came to sit by me after her stint on the platform.  She turned those heavy brows on me and said, “Nah, I don’t think so.  Not from a woman’s point of view.  Anyway, not mine.  That’s mother love your talking about.  Women don’t want that—they had enough of it growing up.”

“What does a woman want, then?”

“She wants to be loved for herself alone, it’s very conditional, a very conditional thing.”

She had been shaking her boobs at me only twenty minutes ago, and I was looking then right into her eyes.  She liked that, I could tell.  We were sipping scotch and soda.  There was a lull.  No one was on the platform and the floodlights were off, making the bar seem dim, and the jukebox wasn’t playing.  One could hear the buzz of conversation and the sounds the bartenders made fixing drinks.  Lisa didn’t smoke, but I did, and I had just lit a cigarette.  I let out a long stream of smoke, and she said, “A woman’s got a body for a reason, and that reason’s not for making babies.”

“What’s it for?”

“To steal a man away from that unconditional love.”

“You’re wrong about that,” I said, taking her seriously, though I knew she was half-joking.  “What does a woman do when her body’s shot?  She’s got to have or make for herself something more.  She’s got a pretty narrow window, there, you know.  It’s the rare woman who looks as good at thirty as she did at twenty.”

“True,” she said, sipping the scotch and soda, unfazed.  “But after the body there is the knowing.  What a woman knows gets her far in life.”

“And men don’t know?”

“Men don’t know anything,” she laughed.  She looked at me again, boldly, right into my eyes, and I saw her trying hard to push something in, right into my skull.  Lisa excited me.  I was falling for her.  And I guessed she was trying to make that happen.  But she kept her distance.  There was always space between us, an arm’s length which she bridged by her talk. 

“So, you think men are—what? not stupid?  Innocent?  What they don’t know. . . .”

“What men don’t know can fill more encyclopedias than what they do.”  She raised her glass and saluted me, took a sip, and continued, “Men know what they want, and that’s usually pretty simple, anybody can figure that out.”

“You mean they want sex, that’s why all these men are here.”

“Maybe not,” she said, smiling, though her brows grew together.  “Not many of them get sex out of coming here.”

“What do they get?”

“They get to look at us.”

“That’s pretty boyish.”

“Why do you come?”

“To look at you.”

I really didn’t know what else to say.  I guess she was right.  She looked at me, again with her brows knitted up, and smiled such a pleasingly soft smile, I felt emboldened to ask if she wanted to come home with me.  She said she would think about it, and after her next trip to the platform she said she would like to.  That’s how it started between Lisa and me.

But bringing her to my house was the fatal error.  What happened there!  I take full responsibility.  But you’ll see.  It began after the first time.  Lisa came on Friday night, or, rather, Saturday morning, early, about three a.m.  We slept till one p.m., and she stayed until late Sunday afternoon, leaving about four.

There was still snow on the ground, it being mid-January, and it was still quite cold.  I never smoked in the house, my mother being not well for as long as I can remember and always complaining about my smoking, anyway.  So I used to step out on the deck, or sometimes when it was very cold, I’d sit in the back room with the deck door slid open and light up.  It was the Sunday evening after Lisa left, and there were two or three inches of snow covering the deck.  The night was very clear and crisply bright, and the moon hung in the southern sky shining on the snow.  I had the door half slid back and a cigarette lit and was thinking of Lisa, feeling her in my mind beside me on the bed, reliving every touch, dreaming, actually—the snow outside in my dreaminess appearing like the sheets on the bed—projecting the two of us onto them, what we were doing, the moonlight spreading a satin sheen along the length of her leg and the top plump curve of her buttock, she stroking my back and kissing the top of my arm, resting her head there, my mother’s face looking in at me through the door, that stony, frozen look, masklike, but the eyes burning, searching the room, finding me, boring into me, the horror of the waking, and my leaping from the chair towards the door, and her not disappearing, but lingering, six inches from me, as though daring me to touch, the speechless horror in my throat, the hell of it.

I found myself freezing from the cold.  How long had I been standing at the door?  The cigarette was on the carpet, burning a hole, and there was that smell, the oddness of it.  I stepped on the flaring embers, swirling the toe of my shoe into them, looking down to make sure they were out and seeing the ashen blackness.  The horror took a long time to subside.  I couldn’t tell if I was shivering from it or from the cold.  I slid the door shut and went inside.  It had to be a dream.  I was in a self-induced trance dreaming about Lisa, that’s all I could think of.  It had only been two weeks since her funeral, and I must have felt guilty for the quickness with which I had put her out of mind, replacing her with. . . .

But, oh! the anger in those eyes!  My mother was a placid sort, the non-complaining type.  She lived with me for over ten years, nearly twelve!  We were good for each other.  She cared for me, and I let her, having no one else, and wanting no one else.  She was the recessive type, and we’d go days at a time without saying two words to each other.  But she always knew what I needed, and I came to depend on her supplying those needs.  She never complained when I traveled, and she never complained when I buried myself in my study.  She never complained.  That’s why the image of those furious eyes filled me with horror.  What?  What?  What had I done?  I did only what life calls one to do.  Live!

After the dream it was still early, and it being early in the semester, I had no preps to do for classes the next day, nothing to do to keep me busy. Because of my mother’s illness, I had let my scholarly work wane, so I had nothing on the desk in my study to work on either.  Perhaps this idleness explains what I went through that night.  I was still feeling the effects of seeing those burning eyes—even as I stood at the door, looking right into them!  A thing like that is nothing to laugh at—I was afraid.  I thought I should fix myself something to eat, but I had no appetite.  I thought maybe tea, but I didn’t want that either. 

I stood in the kitchen, alone in the house, and I didn’t know what to do.  Gradually, I calmed down and started to move.  I went to the sink and filled a glass with water from the faucet and drank a bit.  That helped.  I was regaining possession.  I went to my study, then, picked a book off the shelf—at random—and sat down to read.

It was The Labyrinth of Solitude, apropos, in hindsight, yet had I known what was to come after, I would have fled the house.  I opened it randomly and read: 

The Mexican, whether young or old, criollo or mestizo, general or laborer or lawyer [here, the author might have added, professor], seems to me to be a person who shuts himself away to protect himself [I remember this, for as I read, I translated the words to fit my own recent experiences, my own life, thus: Eli Grant, a man who shuts himself away to protect himself]: his face is a mask and so is his smile.  In his harsh solitude [Oh, how harsh, and how much harsher to come?], which is both barbed and courteous [I am always courteous, even though in my own writing, I am more barbed than anything else], everything serves him as a defense: silence and words, politeness and disdain, irony and resignation [irony need not cancel the courtesy].  He is jealous of his own privacy and that of others, and he is afraid even to glance at his neighbor, because a mere glance can trigger the rage of these electrically charged spirits [Oh, God, the prescience, the depths some men do reach!  I read these words in Spanish, translating mentally, turning them over my tongue].  He passes through life like a man who has been flayed; everything can hurt him, including words and the very suspicion of words.  His language is full of reticences, of metaphors and allusions, of unfinished phrases, while his silence is full of tints, folds, thunderheads, sudden rainbows [Ah, Lisa!], indecipherable threats.

I had been reading for maybe half an hour, pausing and meditating those last two words, their implications, when I saw my mother walk by the door.  For a moment, nothing registered.  She was wearing her floral printed house dress, the loose baggy thing she preferred for comfort in the evenings. 

The routines of every-day life are a comfort, and there is a powerful incentive to laps back into them when life has been radically disrupted.  I felt a sensation of normalcy and security when she passed—Ah! Mom. She’s getting supper up and will call in a moment.  Then my stomach dropped.  I froze and felt my heart stop beating.  The book fell to the floor.

I cannot now describe what I felt as I crept stealthily up the hall to the kitchen, and what I felt when I looked in.  My mother was of medium height and slender build, a mere wisp of a woman, especially toward the end.  Anyone seeing her in the last years could not help but to feel pity.  She was wasted and concave, and though dying, she kept her dignity by scrupulous grooming.  Her gray hair was always set and brushed, her fingernails clear lacquered, her person clean. 

One of her rituals was to arrange flowers in a bowl and set them on the dining room table.  When they began to wilt, she replaced them.  She did this twice a week, and those flowers were her main contribution to the organization of the house, which she otherwise left according to my tastes.  As I looked into the kitchen, she was bending over the counter, inserting the stem of a flower into the bed of needle-like prongs she placed at the bottom of the bowl.  I don’t know if it was because she was so absorbed in this work or if she really wasn’t there that my presence didn’t disturb her.  But I stood in the door, looking directly at her, my heart behaving very badly.  I was filled with yearning for her and revulsion at the idea of her, with fear and astonishment.  I couldn’t make myself step through the door.  I was standing there, gaping in the thundering silence, hearing the blood pounding in my ears, when she turned her head and looked directly at me.  Her eyes, they were aware!  She knew I was there!  And there was no love in those eyes.  I cannot describe what there was.  The same burning I saw before, set in the same expressionless death face.  The room got cold and I was suddenly freezing.  My breath stopped, and I fell unconscious to the floor.

When I woke, she was gone, and there was no sign, of course, of her having been there.  No flowers, or clippings from them, or stripped leaves from their stems; no bowl, no shears, no drop of water on the counter, nothing.  What did I see?  Rage?  The rage of “these electrically charged spirits”?  What did I experience?  A throbbing silence filled with “indecipherable threats”?  Or was I experiencing simply, or not so simply, my own guilt, because she was barely two weeks underground before I made love to Lisa?  I didn’t understand—no one can understand such things—why the acts of living, of loving, should arouse the dead to such ill will that they would defy the boundaries of existence to punish.  To punish!  For loving!  For being loved!  My own mother!  Still, I can’t believe it.  Oh, she was no projection of my psyche, though I thought that at first.

I thought it was all me.  I left the house and got a room at a motel, bought a bottle of scotch, and spent the rest of the night sousing myself, watching television.  I was very conscientious at work the next few days, chummy with my colleagues, feigning interest in my students, generous with praise—people began to talk.  I was heading for a breakdown.  I had to do something.  Living in the motel made me feel like a loose atom.  But gradually the feeling of melancholy returned.  I welcomed it.

I did miss my mother, even though we tended to live separate lives in that house.  She was alone all day, and when I returned in the evening, I typically ignored her, going to my study.  She was a silent presence, but a presence none-the-less.  I sat beside her on the evening she died.  The nurse had left about an hour before, and I took over.  I was reading a book for class discussion the next day.  She was sleeping.  When she passed, I actually felt it.  I looked at her and knew.  It was like the presence she had been for so many years was gone, and all that was left was the mask that had been her face.  After a few days I managed to repress the horror of her hauntings.  I forgot about her.  I managed this forgetting by thinking about Lisa.  On Wednesday, I went to the bar and had a fine time.  She was glad to see me, and we talked.  I felt privileged by that—the way she slipped by the other men and came to me.  The next weekend I stayed there.  It wasn’t until Sunday night I returned to the house.

I was nervous, but a week had passed, and I felt like a different man.  Lisa had warmed to me a great deal.  She let me know in ways a woman has that she liked me, preferred me, even cared for me.  It was astonishing that we had come so far in such a short time.  What I most wondered at was Lisa’s general awareness, her intelligence about so many things—things I was ignorant of.  She knew people, their drives and their ways, how to read them, see through their surfaces to what they were really like.  I was flattered beyond anything that she liked me.  Lisa was becoming the world to me—a whole new world, one I lived in everyday but knew nothing about.

And then the following Wednesday she talked about spending the weekend at the house again.  She wanted to come.  She wanted to feel the life I lived, to be part of it, to live in my “sphere,” she said, to get to know me better.  I couldn’t disappoint her.  What madness!  I should have taken a plane to India, to Africa!  Should have stayed for a year.  Two.  I had such bad feelings about it. The sensation of that “indecipherable threat” had not fully subsided in me.  Those burning eyes were too close to the surface.  It was madness to take her home.  But I couldn’t refuse, she so wanted to come.  Besides, it was for myself I feared.  Not for her.  My mother was punishing me.  I felt I would risk anything for Lisa, so I said O.K.

I stepped outside for an after-dinner cigarette.  It was dusk, and the peculiar glow of the setting sun filled me with peace, and I was filled with the sensation of belonging to the world.  The clouds, the pigeons, the air, even the shadows shone with golden light, and I rose to it and became part of it and felt the invulnerable serenity that comes from union with a great power, a union as though all life lived in me and I in it.  And then it passed, and I felt the shadow: the sensation of something passing into oblivion, and I was left feeling the ashes of uniformity, the equality of all things in the dark.  Oh, the horror!  Not yet realized or felt!

When the sun fell below the horizon, I put out the cigarette and went inside.  The deck room opens onto the kitchen, and the kitchen opens onto the dining room, and that onto the living room.  As I entered the kitchen, I saw red footprints on the white linoleum.  I stared at them, wondering.  Fear gripped my chest and I caught my breath.  I shouted, “Lisa!  Lisa!”  But there was no answer.  I saw something on the floor in the doorway.  It looked like a long piece of raw sausage, or something in sausage casing.  I was perplexed and terrified.  Not wanting to examine it, not being able not to, I walked carefully around the red footprints to the door.  It was a long rope of—no, dear God, the thought of it. . . . 

Lisa was sitting naked on the couch in the living room, her abdomen opened, her intestines and internal organs spilled onto her knees and the floor, and a long trailing cord of viscera had been pulled from her and dropped at the door between the kitchen and the dining room.  Blood was spread everywhere, as though someone had deliberately splashed it around.  There was blood on the curtains behind her, on the walls, on the chair beside the couch, and a huge puddle of blood collected on the floor at her feet.  I threw myself onto her knees, shouting her name, violently bawling, pounding the cushion beside her with my left fist, burying my face in the wound, pushing my head into her, strangling, crawling.  I don’t know how I lived through the next moments.  When I called the police, they arrived and found me covered with blood, even my face and hair.  Strangely, they never found her clothes.  It is no mystery to me. 

And now, though I have no idea what time it is, whether it’s night or day, I declare my guilt and affix my signature: I am as guilty of Lisa’s death as though I had cut her with my own hand.  What can I say?  No weapon was found, either.  That means something.  But I won’t dwell on it.  I will spend the rest of my days in a cell like this, paying the penalty for a blameless life.