I was just approaching my building when I saw them. This was now close to eleven o’clock that night. It was dark, I didn’t recognize them at first. I thought it was just a young couple. Another young couple. Only that. Coming up the street together. Arm in arm. Heads close. She turned to kiss him. Lifted her head to his. Offered him her lips. It was Badria. My wife. Kissing Salim. My cousin.
Well, they knew each other, of course. They had met at parties, they had met at family gatherings, this was my cousin! “Beware of getting into houses and meeting women,” the Prophet said. “But what about the husband’s brother?” someone asked, and the Prophet replied, “The husband’s brother is like death.” He often talked in riddles, the Prophet, it’s all such bullshit. The Prophet believed that the influence of an evil eye is fact. Fact, mind you. The evil eye. The Prophet believed that he himself had once been put under a spell by a Jew and his daughters. The Prophet believed that the fever associated with plague was due to the intense heat of Hell. The Prophet once said, “Filling the belly of a person with pus is better than stuffing his brain with poetry.” Can you believe that? I read poetry! I read a lot. The Prophet believed that if you had a bad dream, you should spit three times on your left side. That’s what Jews do when they want to take the curse off something, you know, they spit on their fingers, ptui, ptui, ptui. I’ve seen elderly Jews doing that on the street. It’s the same thing, am I right? It’s all bullshit, all of it. Jesus turning water into wine, Jesus raising the dead! I mean, come on! Raising the dead? Moses parting the Red Sea? I’d love to see that one!
It all goes back to the time of the dinosaurs, when men huddled in caves in fear of thunder and lightning. It all goes back to Godfearing men arguing violently about which son of Abraham was the true descendant of the one true God, and whether or not Jesus was, in fact, the Messiah. As if a one true God, if there is a God at all, doesn’t know who the hell he himself is! All of them killing each other! Well, it’s no different today, is it? It’s all about killing each other in the name of God, isn’t it?
In the White House, we’ve got a born-again Christian who doesn’t even realize he’s fighting a holy war. An angry dry-drunk, as they say, full of hate, thirsting for white wine, and killing Arabs wherever he can find them. And in the sand out there, on their baggy-pantsed knees, we’ve got a zillion Muslim fanatics, full of hate, bowing to Mecca and vowing to drive the infidel from the Holy Land. Killing each other. All of them killing each other in the name of a one true God.
In my homeland, in my village, the tribal elders would have appointed a council to rape my wife as punishment for her transgression. And then the villagers would have stoned her to death.
But this is America.
I’m an American.
I knew I had to kill Salim, yes, that is what an American male would do, protect his wife, protect the sanctity of his home, kill the intruder. But I also knew I had to get away with it, as they say, I had to kill the violator and still be free to enjoy the pleasures of my wife, my position, I’m the manager of a pharmacy!
I bought the spray paint, two cans, at a hardware store near the pharmacy. I thought that was a good idea, the Star of David. Such symbolism! The six points of the star symbolizing God’s rule over the universe in all six directions, north, south, east, west, up and down. Such bullshit! I didn’t kill Salim until the second night, to make it seem as if he wasn’t the true target, this was merely hate, these were hate crimes. I should have left it at three. Three would have been convincing enough, weren’t you convinced after three? Especially with the bombings that followed? Weren’t you convinced? But I had to go for four. Insurance. The Navajos think four is a sacred number, you know. Again, it has to do with religion, with the four directions. They’re all related, these religions. Jews, Christians, Muslims, they’re all related. And they’re all the same bullshit.
Salim shouldn’t have gone after my wife.
He had enough whores already.
My wife is not a whore.
I did the right thing.
I did the American thing.
They came out through the back door of the station house — a Catholic who hadn’t been to church since he was twelve, and a Jew who put up a tree each and every Christmas — and walked to where they’d parked their cars early this morning. It was a lovely bright afternoon. They both turned their faces up to the sun and lingered a moment. They seemed almost reluctant to go home. It was often that way after they cracked a tough one. They wanted to savor it a bit.
“I’ve got a question,” Meyer said.
“Mm?”
“Do you think I’m too sensitive?”
“No. You’re not sensitive at all.”
“You mean that?”
“I mean it.”
“You’ll make me cry.”
“I just changed my mind.”
Meyer burst out laughing.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “I’m sure glad this didn’t turn out to be what it looked like at first. I’m glad it wasn’t hate.”
“Maybe it was,” Carella said.
They got into their separate cars and drove toward the open gate in the cyclone fence, one car behind the other. Carella honked “Shave-and-a-hair-cut,” and Meyer honked back “Two-bits!” As Carella made his turn, he waved so long. Meyer tooted the horn again.
Both men were smiling.
From the publication of her first book of short stories, By the North Gate, in 1963, Joyce Carol Oates has been the most prolific of major American writers, turning out novels, short stories, reviews, essays, and plays in an unceasing flow as remarkable for its quality as its volume. Writers who are extremely prolific often risk not being taken as seriously as they should — if one can write it that fast, how good can it be? Oates, however, has largely escaped that trap, and even her increasing identification with crime fiction, at a time when the field has attracted a number of other mainstream literary figures, has not lessened her reputation as a formidable author in the least. Many of Oates’s works contain at least some elements of crime and mystery, from the National Book Award winner them, through the Chappaquiddick fictionalization Black Water and the Jeffrey Dahmer-inspired serial-killer novel Zombie, to her controversial 738-page fictionalized biography of Marilyn Monroe, Blonde. The element of detection becomes explicit with the investigations of amateur sleuth Xavier Kilgarvan in the novel The Mysteries of Winterthurn, which, the author explains in an afterword to the 1985 paperback edition, “is the third in a quintet of experimental novels that deal, in genre form, with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.” Why would a literary writer like Oates choose to work in such “deliberately confining structures”? Because “the formal discipline of’genre’... forces us inevitably to a radical re-visioning of the world and the craft of fiction.” Oates, who numbers among her honors in a related genre the Bram Stoker Award of the Horror Writers of America, did not establish an explicit crime-fiction identity until Lives of the Twins appeared under the pseudonym Rosamund Smith. Initially intended to be a secret, the identity of Smith was revealed almost immediately, and later novels were bylined Joyce Carol Oates (large print) writing as Rosamund Smith (smaller print). Her recent novels include The Falls, I’ll Take You There, and Rape: A Love Story.