We put a place mark in the book about time and the three of us go out for a walk. It is one of the most beautiful days ever made, the breeze like the rustle of satin in a room of silken women. K remarks on it. “If I could make a day like this,” he says, “I would give up everything else.”
For moments, I am desperately happy. “Why are you smiling?” my wife asks. “I have never seen you smile like that before.”
I am desperately happy. “Is it because you love us?” she asks. K says he is tired and sits down on the running board of an abandoned automobile. He waves us on as if he were tending a road in the process of repair. “Someday we’ll see each other in a different light.” he says.
In his absence, K dominates our concern. “One of us ought to stay with him while he rests.” says my wife. “Is he waiting?” I ask her. She pretends not to know what I mean.
“I don’t mind if you go back,” I say, hoping that she will choose not to return.
“I can’t bring myself to leave you,” she says.
I finish alone the walk the three of us started together, The path, though giving the appearance of being straight, gradually winds back on itself, When I return home the book I have been reading on time is gone, K has borrowed it, she says. His bowels are stuck without a diverting book to read, “Besides,” she says in a voice like an avalanche of feathers, “he is dying.” (Of what?) “His life is killing him. He is dying of loneliness and ennui. He is incapacitated by an inability to love.” She covers her face with her hands.
“Isn’t that true of everyone?” I say.
“It is even more true of K than of everyone,” she says. “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to show that man that the world is not empty of genuine trust and affection.”
“How are you going to do that?”
She is, before I can ask the question a second time, gone. The door closes behind her. “What about me?” I ask, calling her on the phone. “You’re not so bad,” she says. In her absence I revise my life. I take in cats off the street. My hair grows long in the back and on the sides, recedes gracefully in front. I no longer wear a tie except when I leave the house.
She calls me to say that K’s white hair has turned black.
In the mirror, the face of experience opposes me with eyes that burn with unannounced losses. Everything I have ever been separated from, including a penknife I lost when I was nine, hides in those bleak hollows. In my eyes, in their reflection in the mirror, I can see the book on time that used to keep me company. It is the same book, though apparently also somewhat different, an earlier or later edition. Every page is the page I had been reading last. And on that same page there is the same sentence repeated over and over until abridged at the bottom by the limits of the page. The time of the man who waits will come. The time of the man who waits will
I lie down on the rug to wait for something new to be written.
My life has run out of words.
I have just killed my first woman. It has been that kind of day. Slow. Slower than the New York subway system on a slow hot summer Sunday morning.
My first shots took out the red-rimmed headlights of a fiftyish alcoholic, a former winner of the Prix de Rome. I was testing my sights when he staggered into range as if looking for someone to dispel the myth of his immortality.
When I woke up this morning I thought I would have a breakfast of cereal and fresh fruit and just oil my gun. The fruit has gone rotten overnight. That shouldn’t have happened.
On the Today show, Barbara Walters was interviewing the first dog ever to publish a cookbook. “That dog earns more money than you,” my wife said. It was after that that I thought I’d look out the window to see if there was anything to shoot.
In the afternoon I get a call from someone whose voice I’d never heard before. “You the guy been shooting things out the window?”
“Wrong number,” I say quickly. “I happen to be the dog that wrote the best selling cookbook you may have seen interviewed on the Today show this morning by Barbara Walters.”
“‘Look, whoever you are, I’m not the kind of guy wants to get you in trouble,” my caller says. “So I would appreciate it if you would do me this favor. In about twenty, twenty-five minutes my old lady is coming over for a visit. She’s got short fluffed-up white hair and is a bit stout. She’ll be going into the building almost directly across from your window, the number is 167, and you’ll be doing me a favor if you pop her one as she goes in.”
“I can’t make any promises,” I say. “I’m a spontaneous, indiscriminate, free-fire assassin. If she strikes my fancy, fine. Otherwise, I just couldn’t squeeze it off.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says in a bullying voice dimly familiar, “because if she doesn’t get popped, you may have a policeman ringing your bell the next thing you know.” He hangs up before I can ask him his name.
Some moments after his last words a woman much like the woman he describes bobs like an apple into my sights. It is a question of retaining my independence. Although I could easily shoot her — she has, I might say, a certain flair as a target — I let her go by.
She has hardly gone when there is a heavy knock at the door.
My wife answers. I listen from under the bed behind a locked door.
“We have a complaint that someone is shooting people from a window in this apartment.”
“I’ve been in the kitchen all morning,” she says, “and I can’t hear a thing when the dishwasher is running.”
“Is there someone else in this living unit, a husband or a loved one?”
I couldn’t hear her answer but apparently it was no because I heard the door close a few minutes after.
I dry off my palms, which are reddish (perhaps from the stain on the gun barrel), before returning to my station. Later, my wife comes in and pleads with me to give up the sniping business.
It is a calling, I tell her, which is, for someone who has never had one, something hard to understand.
She shakes my shoulder, making me miss a shot I had particularly relished. “You could give it up if you really wanted to, Jack. Everything we do is a matter of choice, and you know it.”
I offer a compromise: one more killing and then I give it up.
One last one and I will never look through the sights of a gun again.
“All right,” she says, a grudging compliance, “but you have to let me pick out the last one for you. Do you agree?”
This is the first show of interest she has ever given my line of work. We spend the morning and afternoon looking out the window together, waiting for her to make her choice.
“How about that one?” I suggest from time to time.
“Are you kidding?” she would say. “You can’t possibly be interested in that one. That one’s all wrong for you.”
The light is gone so we quit for the day, have a dinner of our usual leftovers and go to bed. (Did I remember to clean the gun?)
The next day. Before I can finish my breakfast of stewed prunes, poached eggs on toast, and tea, she is at the window with my gun fixed into her shoulder, studying the cityscape like a born assassin. “I think I see someone for you,” she says, but when I get there whoever she has in mind for me has evaporated.
Later, the morning wasted in inaction — nothing exactly right — she asks, “Would you mind if I took a shot?”
“At what?”
“Oh, at anything. I just want to see what it feels like.”
“Do you know how to aim?”