You would think so.
He had been with her the night before, rudely and selfishly with her. Though she’d told him to remain downstairs—she’d been stern, and she’d been forthright. She was not a woman like so many women, even professional women, whose disapproval means approval; whose no means yes. But he’d paid no attention to her pleas, her words. From the start, he had not.
Yet perhaps the house was empty? Eunice no longer turned on the alarm system, for he had several times triggered it with his comings and goings. Instead she left lights burning in several rooms, and her radio on continuously. This, police recommended as a way of discouraging break-ins. So far, the simple strategy had worked.
Eunice walked slowly through the first floor of her house. If he was anywhere, it was likely to be the porch—but, no, the porch was empty this evening. The old sofa-swing, its floral canvas badly faded. The quilt Eunice had given him, now soiled, lying on the floor. And the smell of him, unmistakable.
The kitchen, too, was empty. The counters were clean and bare, as Eunice had left them; the sink was gleaming, as she’d left it. One of her outlets for nervous energy was cleaning, scouring her kitchen; her mother had always hired a maid for such work, but Eunice preferred to do it herself. Why invite a stranger into her life?—it was enough, that a stranger had come into her life unbidden.
The Formica top of the kitchen nook was clean, too. When he fed in the kitchen, he avoided that corner; only when Eunice was feeding him did he consent to sit there, Eunice close beside him.
Eunice was about to leave the kitchen when she noticed something gleaming on the floor—a small pile of gnawed chicken bones. And, kicked back alongside the refrigerator, part of an orange, which someone had bitten into, peeling and all. It was his way of eating, and Eunice shook her head in bemused dismay.
Animal. From the start. Hopeless.
Such shame!—she caressed her bruised jaw, ruefully.
Upstairs, Eunice entered her bedroom, sensing, in the split moment before the assault, that something was wrong, the very air into which she stepped seemed agitated; yet she wasn’t quite prepared for the violence with which she was seized from behind, an unseen man’s arms thrown about her torso, shaking her as if in fury—”Don’t fight me, bitch!” Eunice dropped her handbag, her briefcase, the bag containing the hunting knife—she was on the floor herself, on her hands and knees, too astonished to be terrified. For it was not like him to attack her so roughly, with such evident hatred: it was not like him to wish to injure her. Kill her?
Eunice drew breath to scream. She was struck on the side of the head by a man’s fist. She fell, half-conscious, lay on the carpet dazed and struggling to breathe and half-seeing a man’s figure, a shadowy hulking figure, at her bureau, yanking open drawers, throwing things onto the floor and muttering furiously to himself, an inexplicable violence in his very presence and Eunice understood. He will kill me, he will stomp me to death with no more conscience than he might stomp an insect to death, she crawled to retrieve the paper bag that lay close by, she had the knife in her hand and pushed herself to her feet and rushed at him, this man she believed she knew yet had never seen before, taller than she by several inches, heavy in the shoulders, dark-skinned, turning to her astonished as with a manic strength she brought the knife blade down hard against the back of his neck. There was an immediate eruption of blood, the man screamed, a high womanish shriek, he tried in his desperation to shield himself with his outspread fingers from the plunging blade, but Eunice did not weaken, Eunice brought the knife down against him again, and again, his throat, his face, his upper torso, as he threw himself from her, turning in agony from her she stabbed into the nape of his neck, the top of his spine—sobbing, panting, “You! you! you!” not knowing what she did, still less where the superhuman strength came from welling in her veins and muscles that allowed her to do it, except she must do it, it was time.
Hours later Eunice lifted her head, which throbbed with pain. There was something clotted in her vision. She smelled him, smelled it—Death?—that sweetish-sour, rotted odor—before she saw him. The body. The body he’d become.
She was in her bedroom. A man, a stranger, lay on the floor a few yards away. He was dead: clearly dead: the carpet was soaked with his blood, and there was a trail of blood, like an open artery, on an edge of the hardwood floor beside the wall. The man was a black man in his mid-thirties perhaps. He was wearing a dark nylon jacket, badly stained trousers, scuffed boots. He lay on the carpet on his side, in an attitude of childlike peace, or trust, his head lolling awkwardly on his shoulder, his bloodied mouth slack; he was looking away from Eunice through droopy, hooded eyes but she could see the curve of his thick nose, jaw, his wounded cheek—a stranger. It seemed clear that he’d been struck down in the act of yanking a drawer from her bureau; other drawers had been yanked out, and lay in a violent tumble of jewelry, lingerie, sweaters on the floor. The knife with its bloodied blade and handle lay on the carpet close by the body. You would think, seeing it there, that it belonged to the body.
Whose knife?—Eunice did not remember.
Except in a dream how she’d wielded it!—with what desperation, and passion.
There was a stillness here in this room that was the stillness of night. For now it was night. A dark tide rising about Eunice and the dead man both, gathering them in it, buoying them aloft. She would telephone the police, she would explain what she knew. I had to do it, I had no choice. She would not tell them what she knew also—that her life was over, her deepest life. Hers, and his.
On her feet now, swaying, unsteady, she went to her bed and took into her shaking hands the delicate, finely wrought thing fastened to the railing. The bird’s nest, the Indian souvenir, whatever it was, with its woven branches, its intricate interior web, its filmy speckled feathers that stirred with her breath as if stirring with their own mysterious life.
The dream-catcher. Grown so dry and brittle, it broke suddenly in her fingers. And fell in pieces to the floor.
As I sit here, the dream-catcher is on a windowsill about two feet from me, smaller than the dream-catcher of my story, but as intricately fashioned, and quite exquisite. It was given to me by a stranger—an attractive, androgynous, very exotic stranger—when I was signing books in a bookstore in Washington, D.C. in the fall of 1993. People sometimes give me presents at such occasions, or mail things to me, but this object seems to have made an unusual impression on me, or on my psyche. I’m sure that, that night, in my hotel room, it caused me to dream unusually vivid dreams, since I remember walking in the middle of the night, and rapidly writing down ideas for stories; of these, two or three have found their way into actual stories, including “The Dream-Catcher,” though it must be said that dream-originated stories are, for me, the most difficult of all to render into prose. The dream-suggestion seems truly to come from a stranger, a source not inside me, and often I have no clue what it might mean; nor any coherent plot; I’m left with a powerful sense of emotion—but it’s abstract, mysterious.