The very next time we’re together, I’ll do it. I’ll have to do it then, or I may never do it at all.
Finally, the day had come. She knew it from the time she first opened her eyes early in the morning. On the one hand, there was no actual reason for it to be that day, and not the one that had just preceded it or the one that would immediately follow it; it was wholly arbitrary. Yet on the other hand, there was every reason. She had nerved herself to a certain pitch which she might not be able to hold longer than for just a few hours, and once lost or even partially relaxed, might never be able to regain. She needed this certain pitch, she could not do the thing without it. For she was not a professional killer nor yet a passionate one. She could kill neither in cold blood nor in hot. Both extremes were foreign to her nature. She could only kill as she was about to kill now: for an ideal, as an obligation, to fulfill a vow. As one lighted a taper at an altar: in expiation.
And only this once, never again.
He was a man. Of that there could be no doubt. He had been married to Starr, Starr had been his wife. He was the one she wanted killed, he and no other. And Starr-Madeline would be the goddess of the machine, who earned it out for her.
Let whatever he had done to her, whatever had made her want him killed, be buried with him, then, go down into the grave with the two of them and never be known. Maybe it was better that way. Who knew what the thing was? Why let it live on, dirtying the world? Why take it with her into some cell and nurse the morbid knowledge of it for the next twenty years or even her whole lifetime? Somehow in all her calculations — no, that wasn’t the word, she didn’t calculate in this — in all her willingness to accept punishment, to undergo penalty, she had never visualized herself being given a death sentence. Not that this would have deterred her. But it was always a lengthy prison term that she foresaw being meted out to her.
This was the day, then. It had come.
She hadn’t even left her bed yet. The slats of the Venetian blinds, or rather the interstices between them, drew thin pencil strokes of yellow on the wall opposite the window, and on the floor, and on the counterpane on her bed, and even partly up one of her bare arms. She even had the impression that one of these stripes of light must be lying flat across the bridge of her nose, because of a dazzle effect she got in both eyes. She thought it was charming; like being in a golden cage.
She got up and went over to the blinds and tugged the cord that controlled them. They went up supplely, with only a slight rustling sound, and the day became a full foursquare panel, not just streaked glimmers on a wall. It was surging with sunlight, and in it the city looked like something brand-new, that had just come into being. Every brick spotless, every paving block freshly laid. She leaned out, and a taxi with an orange roof polished as a mirror went scuttling by under her eyes, like some kind of an amiable, off-color beetle scampering for cover.
How strange, she thought, we’re both in this city together at this very moment, though at a distance. We’re both breathing, we’re both looking at things, even though we’re apart. Yet, by tonight, or by the early hours of the morning, he’ll be dead. Then he won’t be in this city anymore, just I will be, alone. Where will his breaths be then, where will they have gone? Where will the sights reflected on the irises of his eyes be then, where will they have gone?
I don’t know, for I didn’t order death, fashion it. I only know that he’ll be gone into it.
She turned away from the window, and as she passed the discomposed bed she’d just now been sleeping in, glanced at it reflectively. Last night, she thought, we both slept, he and I, and our sleeps were alike. Today we both woke up from our sleeps. Tonight we’ll both sleep again, he and I, but our sleeps this time will be different. Tomorrow again I’ll wake up, as I did today. Tomorrow he won’t; for him there’ll be no tomorrow.
Sleep, that little bit of death embedded in life. No, she corrected herself. Sleep is not death. Not at all like it. People are wrong when they say or think that. “Dead to the world,” meaning a sound sleep. Completely wrong. For the body goes on functioning. It breathes, the blood flows, the heart beats. Sometimes the body even moves, turns itself over. The dreams of the daytime world color sleep; night after night they are there, even though they may not be recalled the next day.
No, the French Revolutionaries who inscribed “Death is eternal sleep” on tombstones were mistaken. There is no point of similarity between the two, not any at all. Even the position of the eyes is different, for in sleep they are closed, but in death, paradoxically, they remain open. It is human hands that have to close them.
No, sleep is not death. Sleep is submerged life.
She shook her head in self-annoyance. Why do I torture myself so? Just do it, and have done with it! Not think about it, think about it, think about it, all the time.
But I have to think about it. The other things I did for her were minor, subsidiary. This is the main thing. This is the important one. This is the one she wanted most.
She took a brief shower, without using soap. She took an average of two a day, one in the morning, one in the evening, and only used soap about every second one; it was actually superfluous more often than that, she was inclined to believe. Possibly even unbeneficial to the skin.
She dressed and made a cup of instant coffee. She told herself unwillingly, I suppose I ought to eat something. She was always telling herself this, in the mornings, and always trying to evade doing so. She finally compelled herself, against her own inclination, to slip a slice of wheat bread into the toaster, and plug it in.
Then she ate standing up, biting at the toast in one hand, taking swallows of the coffee in the other. She put the cup down finally, left part of the rind of the bread, and acted as if she were glad it was over. She was.
The city was awake now. She lit a cigarette and went back to the window and stood there looking out again. The day was so normal, so everyday looking. You couldn’t tell it held death in it.
A mouse-colored French poodle on leash to a young girl stopped to investigate a tree, decided against it, went on to the next. A deliveryman came along pedaling a bicycle with a built-in box for carrying groceries.
A trim-looking truck went by, the legend “U.S. Mail” on it, the lower half blue, the upper half white, a thin band, no more than a stripe, of red separating them. They should have put the red on top, she thought idly; the expression was “red, white, and blue,” not “white, red, and blue.” Still, she supposed, maybe they decided a red roof wouldn’t look good on a truck.
Somewhere in the immediate vicinity, but out of sight, an apartment-house doorman kept blowing on his whistle, trying to conjure up a cab for his waiting tenant. There was something unutterably lonely and plaintive about the sound.
A defective “Don’t Walk” sign stayed red when it should have turned green and caused a minor amount of traffic confusion down at the next crossing. Then it finally meshed and turned green, but by now all the others had turned red again.
Two nuns floated majestically along, heading a long double-file procession of small schoolchildren.
A jet coursed by overhead, turning the sky into a tom-tom, heading for some faraway romantic place. Anchorage, Tokyo, Manila.
A couple of pigeons, outmoded, flew up from a cornice defiantly then turned around and came down on it again, their challenge ignored.
A Sanitation Department street-washing vehicle came trundling clumsily along, held its water along a stretch of curb where there were no pedestrians, then let fly target-accurate as it came abreast of a man and woman walking together. They both jumped aside and started to brush at themselves, ruefully but uncomplainingly.