“Will you please go?” she whispers. We face each other. Her eyes dream my destruction. When I go to the door she calls me back. “Will you come over tomorrow?”
I shake my head.
“I want to see you again, Christopher.”
“All right.” I want to get out, away from her, before the aunt comes.
“Do you still love me?”
I bury my face in her breasts. “I’ll be over in the afternoon.” (Leave hating her, feeling untouched.) I have the sense on the subway, riding home, that if I stop watching myself I won’t be there.
The later edition of the Post: POLICE SAY NEW CLUES TO CRIPPLE KILLER’S IDENTITY. According to witnesses, killer is dark blond, medium height, between eighteen and twenty-five. “Looks like some ordinary college kid,” some woman says. “Those kids don’t get enough to do at school.” There is a police drawing, a composite sketch. Citizens are requested to phone the police immediately if they see anyone behaving suspiciously answering to above description. The old man on my left — it is his paper we are looking at — stares at me. I smile back like a lamb.
My mother, coming into my room, tells me that Joel Minitz, who was the son of a friend of hers, was killed in the war. “I don’t want you to go. Promise me you’ll do everything you can to stay out.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“It would be such a waste, Chrissy. When you were four — friends of mine still talk about it — you used to add three two-figure numbers in your head. Do you remember?”
“When you tell me I remember.”
“Don’t have a chip on your shoulder like Dad. He has other good qualities but that’s not one of them. You used to smile all the time when you were younger. You never gave anyone any trouble. All my friends used to say what a beautiful child you were.”
He calls her, wanting something. Complaining without words to me, she hurries out. Her eyes vengeful, frightened. Her movement a shriek. I cover my ears with my hands.
In the night a man comes wearing my mask. It doesn’t come off, he says. “I want you to help me get it off.” I push him out the door but he comes in again. He tells me that since wearing the mask he has killed six people — f our women, two children. The children his brothers, one perhaps himself. I offer to cut the mask off for him. He says no, then yes. There is no other way. When the mask is half off I dig the knife into his throat. The point sticks, comes out his ear (like a hearing aid). Nowhere to put him, I carry him into the street. Run with him over my shoulder. A girl sees us, yells for me to stop. Bending over, I catapult the body at her. Another takes its place. I throw it off but the weight remains. At the end of the road I see my face in the mirror. I am wearing the mask — one side of it cut away, the skin scourged, bubbling.
When I wake up I hear my father storming through the house, unable to sleep. “Damn sirens,” he is saying.
The News has another drawing of the killer. He is more dark than light, the police say. (Three witnesses say dark, one says light to medium.) “The man we want is an amateur,” an unidentified source tells a News reporter in an interview. “In each case there are more wounds than necessary. And the stabbings themselves are imprecise. This is a violent man who kills to satisfy something missing in his life. We are close to nailing him. We will nail him. I can’t say any more without endangering routine security.” A Puerto Rican, picked up as a suspect, has been let go; says he was not beaten by the police.
I call the Selective Service Board. The woman there says she gives no information over the phone, that it is against the law.
“Whose law? God’s?”
She says she just does what she’s told.
I hear him through the door: “He wants to put me in my grave, Mary. That’s what he wants. I’ll see him in hell first, the bastard.”
“Don’t yell,” she says. “Please. He wants nothing more than to please you.”
“You know what he can do that would please me?”
“Shh. Behave yourself.”
Something happened on the subway. Some man bumped into me from behind, trying to get a seat. I pushed back, my elbow catching him in the neck. His head against the metal of the door, bleeding. His glasses cracked. An old guy. Holding a dirty handkerchief to his forehead. I said I was sorry. The guy crying. An accident, I told him. A woman kept saying she was going to get the police. I got off at the next stop and, without looking back, got away.
He brought her a white rose he had taken from someone’s garden. She kissed him timidly, held him away, then fell against him, holding on as if she were drowning. “How lovely,” she said. He was watching himself, distrustful of the man he was watching, jealous. While Rosemary seemed without a sense of danger. They embraced violently on the couch, contesting their affection, Christopher worried about the aunt walking in — other fears like shadows behind cellar doors, Rosemary assuring him that her aunt wouldn’t be back until late and even so, even if she walked in, she wouldn’t mind.
So that’s how it had been with Parks — it was a revelation to him. Despite her assurances, he listened for footsteps in the hall. It was possible that he had been followed or that Parks himself would, out of habit, appear.
He suggested that they go into her room, feeling numb, a man about to parachute out of a plane for the first time. Wanting to stay where he was. Not to fall.
Rosemary hesitated, her head cocked, as though reading his intentions. “I’d rather stay here,” she said in a tremulous voice. “It doesn’t matter, does it?”
He persisted, distrustful of her affection, in pursuit (fleeing her claim on him) of knowledge. He had only to mention Parks to break her down, drag the corpse of his name between them. Her silence pleaded with him. To be kind. To be brutal and kind.
Rosemary started to speak, her lips moving, tasting the possibility of words, without words. A tension of wills between them.
And when he had lost her, even temporarily, he would pursue her again — his need determined by the pains of failure — nagged by his own secrets, suspicious of hers.
And so it went, accumulating commitments and vengeances.
He felt reprieved at first and then, wanting her, sick with regret. She was leaning away from him, self-absorbed, silent. He wanted to have her — it seemed necessary — to break her down. She looked as remote and cool as the first time he saw her. He was not asking for anything, wouldn’t ask, his need apart from what he wanted.
Then, without explanation, she got up and was gone. Lonely, he paced the living room, drawn to the window to see if anyone was there he knew. For a moment, he thought he saw Parks, but it was someone else. That there were no policemen within view worried him. It was better to know where they were, safer. Two boys were fighting, one holding a knife behind his back. He thought to warn the other, to yell from the window, then Rosemary returned, distracting him.
“We can go into my room now if you want to,” she said, her face half turned away as if in hiding.
He said it was late, he had to go. In his imagination he dashed out and, getting nowhere he wanted to be — wanting to be where he wasn’t — came back.
“I hate you,” she said in a hoarse, fierce whisper, and flung the flower, the white rose, in his face. It burned like a slap.
She felt released, unburdened. He turned away.
He turned back older, or feeling older, ruined, defeated, hated. His boyhood gone, smashed. He closed his eyes to recall the time that had passed, to bring himself back to where, feeling himself immortal — that sanctuary of his fear — he had been. And he discovered, the present revising his vision of the past, that he had never been invulnerable, that he had never, outside of thinking himself so, outside of self-delusion, been safe. There was no place to turn back to. There never had been a place or a time. He was born a dying man.