Once I saw some pornographic movies of what I suppose are the ordinary sort—at any rate, men and live women doing it together—and after the first second or so I didn't feel any of the ususal delightful hot excitement (such as comes to me when I have someone undress a woman in my imagination or as used to come to me at burlesque shows) but only a cold intense awe like watching live birth or death might awaken or observing some completely inorganic phenomenon on a grand scale, such as the creep of a glacier or the surging of the sea in storm or the implacable rush and leap of a forest fire and the flight of large animals before it, or the slow wheeling of the stars.
“No, Vivian, I don't understand it at all,” I heard myself say, quite loudly. It hit me that I could freely talk to Vivian now, talk to her about all the things I'd never been able to hint at before, talk to her about the things beyond those things—the things you couldn't even think of until you'd talked about the others first—why, there was no end to it.. What's more, I realized I wouldn't have minded if Vivian had been able to listen to me, yes, and answer me too, comment on what I said, show me her view of things and maybe bring new light into my own brain that way; in fact, I even wished she would.
It hit me hard, let me tell you, it struck me all in a heap as our country cousins say, to realize that in one way I was sorry now I had killed Vivian. I decided that I would have to get this thing straightened out, I would have to explain myself to myself, before I did anything else.
Don't get me wrong, I didn't want to go back and change what I'd done. I was still delighted that I had Vivian in a situation where I could enjoy her just as I wanted to. My gaze kept licking back every few seconds to her naked breasts and every time it did I re-experienced that same mixed ecstasy. But I was secure in the knowledge that I could find fulfillment with Vivian whenever I wanted: I had all the night ahead of me. It was just that it was beginning to seem a necessary or at least a desirable part of my fulfillment that I explain myself first. And if I talked to Vivian while doing it, that wasn't because I really wanted her alive or had any superstitious notions about a listening spirit, but just because it made the words come out of me easier. It was for the same general reason that I didn't take off, though I'd been going to, her black sleeping mask with its velvet-pupiled sequin eyes staring at the ceiling. It was easier for me to talk to her with her real eyes covered, whether they were open or closed underneath. (And the mask did add to my excitement.)
“I had to kill you, Vivian, didn't you see?” I began. “I've fought against this warped and cowardly urge of mine most of my life, and I was beginning to think I had it licked, that the delights of art and knowledge would be enough for me as I grew older and finally faded away. But then you came along, Vivian, and you fascinated me so, you were so fearfully lovely and dreadfully desirable, and you had an imagination that innocently teetered so close to the verge of my dirtiest most delightful inner pits—like the night you wondered what Persephone thought when she was stolen by Hades—that all my old dreams reawakened and I simply had to possess you. And the only way I could possess you was to kill you. Each man kills the thing he loves—a great poet said that, Vivian, Oscar Wilde. Man has always killed his gods—the least study of anthropology shows you that, Vivian. The god has to be sacrificed so that there can be that great release, that great fulfillment. And the same is true of the goddess.
“It's not altogether my fault I'm the way I am, though I do like to take a little credit for the things I do,” I continued. I had begun to pace now, back and forth past the foot of the bed, glancing at Vivian at the turns. “But I have to admit that my family background and some chance circumstances were largely responsible. I was a lonely and yearning child and pretty much unloved. I had a couple of parents who were very severe with me and with themselves, but who also drank too much. You know, Vivian, I sometimes think America is inhabited solely by a race of puritanical drunks—some of whom admittedly never take a drink all their lives. I also had a sister two years older named Beatrice.
“I've told you about Beatrice, Vivian, and especially about her tragic death from flu when I was only thirteen, how she died while I was alone in the house with her, my mother being alcoholically occupied. I often tell that anecdote to get a little sympathy. What I never tell was that Beatrice was a big prig and a tattletale and a tease—I call her big because she was two years older than me. As soon as she realized that I, her brother, was curious about her body, she started to make a great show of modesty and propriety. ‘Ma, Archie tried to come into the bathroom while I was taking my bath;’ ‘Ma, Archie climbed on the top of the porch and peeked in my bedroom’—that sort of thing. Naturally it made my curiosity wilder. She also deliberately created situations to tease and frustrate and shame me and get me punished. One hot summer afternoon she pretended to be taking a nap—I swear she was just pretending —and her door was open and I couldn't help myself, I just had to tiptoe in and slowly, very slowly, frightened half to death, draw back the sheet. I was just starting to ease open the buttons of her pyjamas when she jerked up and let off an awful scream. I said I had just been going to tickle her, but it was no good; I got a severe whipping, an unnecessarily severe one by any standards, but then Beatrice was just an age for my father to be deeply in love with her—unconsciously, no doubt!—in that disgustingly pontifical, possessive, sentimental, self-satisfied way that hairy-chested fathers always seem to feel about their nubile daughters.
“After that I stayed strictly away from Beatrice and wouldn't bite on any of her traps—until the afternoon I came home from school and found mother snoring on the floor in the living room and Beatrice dead in bed upstairs. I satisfied my curiosity then—oh, I knew she was my sister and in a way I sincerely loved and respected her, and I knew what incest meant and that it was supposed to be very terrible, and I was very frightened of death and the dead and I was really scared of catching the flu, but I simply had to. Or maybe I wasn't entirely frightened of death. I mean, maybe I was frightened of death in the same way I was of sex—because they'd both been made horror-mysteries for me—and maybe I wanted to penetrate both mysteries at the same time.
“Anyway, I satisfied my curiosity, and it went further than that, further than I'd expected.
“You know, sex is a funny thing, Vivian. You start out just being overpoweringly curious and you end up getting hooked. You do something once and it can set a pattern forever. Why? How? I get the strangest feeling of reality-unreality whenever I think back to that cold bleak bedroom and the smoky twilight closing down and the burnt-linen stink of flu coming through the smell of mother's lilac toilet water—"
I got the damndest scare just then. I thought Vivian moved. I thought her body moved just a little. But I decided right away that it was because I'd been frightening myself remembering that afternoon with Beatrice so long ago.
“That was how I got hooked, Vivian. The fixation might have gradually faded, or it might not, but I was slow in getting social and starting to go with the girls and then about four or five years later there came the fiendish wonderful coincidence of moving to the city and discovering that my uncle there had the job of night attendant at the morgue. He had the family weakness for liquor; I hung around and played up to him. Pretty soon he took to leaving me to answer the phone while he sneaked out to get a drink. I won't go into that much, it didn't last long, but for a few evenings I inhabited a temple of Edgar Allan Poe— Poe had my weakness, Vivian, or at least he understood it damned well, just read ‘Premature Burial,’ ‘The Oblong Box,’ ‘Usher,’ ‘Berenice,’ and ‘Ligeia.’ Yes, for a brief space I had my dark-faned shrine, my Ulalumes and Annabel Lees. Most of the bodies were horrible, but not all.