emergencies.
The stupid beast did not understand me at all. If this misapprehension of my nature and motives made him more pliable, however, he was free to put faith in it. I had been using such unrelenting force to maintain control of him that I was afraid he would not last as long as I would need him another month or more. If he was now prepared to offer considerably less resistance, he might avoid a brain meltdown and be a useful pair of hands until I no longer required his services.
At my direction, he went outside to determine if the Honda was still operable.
The engine started. There had been a loss of most of the coolant, but Shenk was able to back the car away from the palm tree, return it to the driveway, and park under the portico before it overheated.
The right front fender was crumpled. The wadded sheet metal abraded the tire; it would quickly shave away the rubber. Shenk would not be driving the car so far, however, that a flat fire would be a risk.
In the house again, in the foyer, he carefully wrapped Arling's blood-soaked body in a painter's tarp that he had fetched from the garage. He carried the dead man out to the Honda and placed him in the trunk.
He did not dump the body rudely into the car but handled it with surprising gentleness.
As though he were fond of Arling.
As though he were putting a treasured lover to bed after she had fallen asleep in another room.
Though his swollen eyes were hard to read, there seemed to be a wistfulness in them.
I did not display any of this housekeeping on the television in Susan's bedroom. Given her current state of mind, that seemed unwise.
In fact, I switched off the television and closed the armoire in which it was housed.
She did not react to the click and hum and rattle of the pair of motorized cabinet doors.
She lay unnervingly still, staring fixedly at the ceiling. Occasionally she blinked.
Those amazing grey-blue eyes, like the sky reflected in winter ice melt. Still lovely. But strange now.
She blinked.
I waited.
Another blink.
Nothing more.
Shenk was able to drive the battered Honda into the garage before the engine froze up. He closed the door and left the car there.
In a few days, Fritz Arling's decomposing body could begin to stink. Before I was finished with my project a month hence, the stench would be terrible.
For more than one reason, I was not concerned about this. First, no domestic staff or gardeners would be coming to work; there was no one to get a whiff of Arling and become suspicious. Second, the stink would be limited to the garage, and here in the house, Susan would never become aware of it.
I myself lacked an olfactory sense, of course, and could not be offended. This was, perhaps, one instance when the limitations of my existence had a positive aspect.
Although I must admit to having some curiosity as to the particular quality and intensity of the stench of decomposing flesh. As I have never smelled a blooming rose or a corpse, I imagine the first experience of each would be equally interesting if not equally refreshing.
Shenk gathered cleaning supplies and mopped up the blood in the foyer. He worked quickly, because I wanted him to get back to his labours in the basement as soon as possible.
Susan was still brooding, gazing at worlds beyond this one. Perhaps staring into the past or the future or both.
I began to wonder if my little experiment in discipline had been as good an idea as I had initially thought. The depth of her shock and the violence of her emotional reaction were not what I had expected.
I had anticipated her terror.
But not her grief.
Why should she grieve for Arling?
He was only an employee.
I considered the possibility that there had been another aspect to their relationship of which I had not been aware. But I could not imagine what it might be.
Considering their age and class differences, I doubted that they had been lovers.
I studied her grey-blue stare.
Blink.
Blink.
I reviewed the videotape of Shenk's assault on Arling. In three minutes I scanned it repeatedly at high speed.
In retrospect, I began to see that forcing her to witness this grisly killing might have been a somewhat extreme punishment for her recalcitrant attitude.
Blink.
On the other hand, people pay hard-earned money to see movies filled with substantially more violence than that which was visited on Fritz Arling.
In the film Scream, the beauteous Ms. Drew Barrymore herself was slaughtered in a manner every bit as brutal as Arling's death and then she was strung up in a tree to drip like a gutted hog. Others in this movie died even more horrible deaths, yet Scream was a tremendous box-office success, and people who watched it in theatres no doubt did so while eating popcorn and munching on chocolate candy.
Perplexing.
Being human is a complex task. Humanity is so filled with contradiction.
Sometimes I despair of making my way in a world of flesh.
Abandoning my resolve not to speak until spoken to, I said, 'Well, Susan, we must take some consolation from the fact that it was a necessary death.'
Grey-blue… grey-blue… blink.
'It was fate,' I assured her, 'and none of us can escape the hand of fate.'
Blink.
'Arling had to die. If I had allowed him to leave, the police would have been summoned. I would never have the chance to know the life of the flesh. Fate brought him here, and if we must be angry with anyone, we must be angry with fate.'
I could not even be sure that she heard me.
Yet I continued: 'Arling was old, and I am young. The old must make way for the young. It has always been thus.'
Blink.
'Every day the old die to make way for new generations though, of course, they do not always succumb with quite so much drama as poor Arling.'
Her continued silence, her almost deathlike repose, caused me to wonder if she might be catatonic. Not just brooding. Not just punishing me with silence.
If she was, indeed, catatonic, she would be easy to deal with through the impregnation and the eventual removal of the partially developed foetus from her womb.
Yet if she was traumatized to such an extent that she was not even aware of carrying the child that I would create with her, then the process would be depressingly impersonal, even mechanical, and utterly lacking in the romance which I had so long anticipated with so much pleasure.
Blink.
Exasperated, I must confess that I began seriously to consider alternatives to Susan.
I do not believe this to be an indication of a potential for unfaithfulness. Even if I had flesh, I would never cheat on her as long as my feelings for her were to some extent, any extent, reciprocated.
But if she was now so deeply traumatized as to be essentially brain dead, she was gone anyway. She was just a husk. One cannot love a husk.
At least I cannot love a husk.
I require a relationship with depth, with give and take, with the promise of discovery and the possibility of joy.
