I was behind in school, there were papers to write and exams were coming up but still I was young; the grass was green and the air was heavy with the sound of bees and I had just come back from the brink of Death itself, back to the sun and air. Now I was free; and my life, which I had thought was lost, stretched out indescribably precious and sweet before me.
I felt rotten. Dead butterfly floating on the surface of the pool. Audible machine hum. Drowned crickets and beetles swirling in the plastic filter baskets. Above, the setting sun flared gaudy and inhuman, blood-red shelves of cloud that suggested end-times footage of catastrophe and ruin: detonations on Pacific atolls, wildlife running before sheets of flame.
And isn’t the whole point of things – beautiful things – that they connect you to some larger beauty?
It made me feel less mortal, less ordinary. It was support and vindication; it was sustenance and sum. It was the keystone that held the whole cathedral up. And it was awful to learn, by having it so suddenly vanish from under me, that all my adult life I’d been privately sustained by that great, hidden, savage joy: the conviction that my whole life was balanced atop a secret that might at any movement blow me part.
I was confused by this sudden glare of attention; it was as if the characters in a favorite painting, absorbed in their own concerns, had looked up out of the canvas and spoken to me.
But just when I thought I was going to get away, the creaky machinery of his face began to grind and a cardboard dawn of recognition was lowered, with jerks, from the dusty proscenium.
The lamplight was eerie, and, standing there motionless in our bathrobes, sleepy, with shadows flickering all around, I felt as though I had woken from one dream into an even more remote one, some bizarre wartime bomb shelter of the unconscious.
Whatever else one may say about guilt, it certainly lends one diabolical powers of invention;.
There’s no ‘rational grounds’ for anything I care about.
Wade straight through life, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and heart open.
We stood looking at each other. It was raining. She looked at me with her rain-colored eyes.
Horrific as it was, the present dark, I was afraid to leave it for the other, permanent dark – jelly and bloat, the muddy pit. I had seen the shadow of it on Bunny’s face – stupid terror; the whole world opening upside down; his life exploding in a thunder of crows and the sky expanding empty over his stomach like a white ocean. Then nothing. Rotten stumps, sowbugs crawling in the fallen leaves. Dirt and dark.
I am gifted at blending myself into any given milieu – you’ve never seen such a typical California teenager as I was, nor such a dissolute and callous pre-med student – but somehow despite my efforts, I am never able to blend myself in entirely and remain in some respects quite distinct from my surroundings, in the same way that a green chameleon remains a distinct entity from the leaf upon which it sits, no matter how perfectly it has approximated the the subtleties of the particular shade.
And–since this willful amnesia had kept Robin’s death from being translated into that sweet old family vernacular which smoothed even the bitterest mysteries into comfortable, comprehensible form–the memory of that day’s events had a chaotic, fragmented quality, bright mirror-shards of nightmare which flared at the smell of wisteria, the creaking of a clothes-line, a certain stormy cast of spring light.
Joan of Arc had led armies when she was hardly older than Harriet. Yet, for Christmas last year, Harriet’s father had given Harriet an insulting board game for girls called What Shall I Be? It was a particularly flimsy game, meant to offer career guidance but no matter how well you played, it offered only four possible futures: teacher, ballerina, mother, or nurse.
Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof off the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan? Yet living or dead: their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world.
In fact, I can’t think of much I’d like better than for him to step into the room right now, glasses fogged and smelling of damp wool, shaking the rain from his hair like an old dog and saying: ‘Dickie, my boy, what you got for a thirsty old man to drink tonight?
Nihil sub sole novum, I thought as I walked back down the hall to my room. Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.
In New York, everything reminded me of my mother – every taxi, every street corner, every cloud that passed over the sun – but out in this hot mineral emptiness, it was as if she had never existed; I could not even imagine her spirit looking down on me. All trace of her seemed burned away in the thin desert air.
But, if I dare say it, it wasn’t until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.