The 1st Deadly Sin

stairs.

“Rest a moment,” she said.

“I’m a mountain climber,” he said, and their whispered exchange seemed to him so inane that he gave a short bark of laughter that banged off dull walls and echoed.

“What?” he said again, and all the time he knew.

It was a small room of unpainted plank walls, rough-finished and scarred with white streaks as if some frantic beast had clawed to escape. There was a single metal cot with a flat spring of woven tin straps. On this was thrown a thin mattress, uncovered, the striped grey ticking soiled and burned.

There was one kitchen chair that had been painted fifty times and was now so dented and nicked that a dozen colors showed in bruised blotches. A bare light bulb, orange and dim, hung from a dusty cord.

The floor was patched with linoleum so worn the pattern had disappeared and brown backing showed through. The unframed mirror on the inside of the closed door was tarnished and cracked. The iron ashtray on the floor near the cot overflowed with cold cigarette butts. The room smelled of must, mildew, and old love.

“Beautiful,” Daniel Blank said wonderingly, staring about. “It’s a stage set. Any moment now a wall swings away, and there will be the audience applauding politely. What are my lines?”

“Take off your wig,” she said.

He did, standing by the cot with the hair held foolishly in his two hands, offering her a small, dead animal.

She came close and caressed his shaven skull with both hands.

“Do you like this room?” she asked.

“Well…it’s not exactly my idea of a love nest.”

“Oh it’s more than that. Much more. Lie down.”

Gingerly, with some distaste, he sat on the stained mattress. She softly pressed him back. He stared up at the naked bulb, and there seemed to be a nimbus about it, a glow composed of a million shining particles that pulsed, contracted, expanded until they filled the room.

And then, almost before he knew it had started, she was doing things to him. He could not believe this intelligent, somber, reserved woman was doing those things. He felt a shock of fear, made a few muttered protests. But her voice was soft, soothing. After awhile he just lay there, his eyes closed now, and let her do what she would.

“Scream if you like,” she said. “No one can hear.”

But he clenched his jaws and thought he might die of pleasure.

He opened his eyes and saw her lying naked beside him, her long, white body as limp as a fileted fish. She began undressing him with practiced fingers…opening buttons…sliding down zippers…tugging things away gently, so gently he hardly had to move at all…

Then she was using him, using him, and he began to understand what his fate might be. Fear dissolved in a kind of sexual faint he had never experienced before as her strong hands pulled, her dry tongue rasped over his fevered skin.

“Soon,” she promised. “Soon.”

Once he felt a pain so sharp and sweet he thought she had murdered him. Once he heard her laughing: a thick, burbling sound. Once she wound him about with her smooth, black hair, fashioned a small noose and pulled it tight.

It went on and on, his will dissolving, a great weight lifting, and he would pay any price. It was climbing: mission, danger, sublimity. Finally, the summit.

Later, he was exploring her body and saw, for the first time, her armpits were unshaved. He discovered, hidden in the damp, scented hairs under her left arm, a small tattoo in a curious design.

Still later they were drowsing in each other’s sweated arms, the light turned off, when he half-awoke and became conscious of a presence in the room. The door to the corridor was partly open. Through sticky eyes he saw someone standing silently at the foot of the cot, staring down at their linked bodies.

In the dim light Daniel Blank had a smeary impression of a naked figure or someone dressed in white. Blank raised his head and made a hissing sound. The wraith withdrew. The door closed softly. He was left alone with her in that dreadful room.

5

One night, lying naked and alone between his sateen sheets, Daniel Blank wondered if this world might not be another world’s dream. It was conceivable: somewhere another planet populated by a sentient people of superior intelligence who shared a communal dream as a method of play. And Earth was their dream, filled with fantasies, grotesqueries, evil-all the irrationalities they themselves rejected in their daily lives but turned to in sleep for relaxation. For fun.

Then we are all smoke and drifting. We are creatures of another world’s midnight visions, moving through a life as illogical as any dream, and as realistic. We exist only in a stranger’s slumber, and our death is his awaking, smiling at the mad, tangled plot his sleep conceived.

It seemed to Blank that since meeting Celia Montfort his existence had taken on the quality of a dream, the vaporous quality of a dream shot through with wild, bright flashes. His life had become all variables and, just before falling asleep to his own disordered dream, he wondered if AMROK II, properly programmed, might print out the meaning in a microsecond, as something of enormous consequence.

“No, no,” Celia Montfort said intently, leaning forward into the candlelight. “Evil isn’t just an absence of good. It’s not just omission; it’s commission, an action. You can’t call that man evil just because he lets people starve to put his country’s meager resources into heavy industry. That was a political and economic decision. Perhaps he is right, perhaps not. Those things don’t interest me. But I think you’re wrong to call him evil. Evil is really a kind of religion. I think he’s just a well-meaning fool. But evil he’s not. Evil implies intelligence and a deliberate intent. Don’t you agree, Daniel?”

She turned suddenly to him. His hand shook, and he spilled a few drops of red wine. They dripped onto the unpressed linen tablecloth, spreading out like clots of thick blood.

“Well…” he said slowly.

She was having a dinner party: Blank, the Mortons, and Anthony Montfort seated around an enormous, candle-lighted dining table that could easily have accommodated twice their number in a chilly and cavernous dining hall. The meal, bland and without surprises, had been served by Valenter and a heavy, middle-aged woman with a perceptible black mustache.

The dishes were being removed, they were finishing a dusty beaujolais, and their conversation had turned to the current visit to Washington of the dictator of a new African nation, a man who wore white-piped vests and a shoulder holster.

“No, Samuel,” Celia shook her head, “he is not an evil man. You use that word loosely. He’s just a bungler. Greedy perhaps. Or out for revenge on his enemies. But greed and revenge are grubby motives. True evil has a kind of nobility, as all faiths do. Faith implies total surrender, a giving up of reason.”

“Who was evil?” Florence Morton asked.

“Hitler?” Samuel Morton asked.

Celia Montfort looked slowly around the table. “You don’t understand,” she said softly. “I’m not talking about evil for the sake of ambition. I’m talking about evil for the sake of evil. Not Hitler-no. I mean saints of evil-men and women who see a vision and follow it. Just as Christian saints perceived a vision of good and followed that. I don’t believe there have been any modern saints, of good or evil. But the possibility exists. In all of us.”

“I understand,” Anthony Montfort said loudly, and they all turned in surprise to look at him.

“To do evil because it’s fun,” the boy said.

“Yes, Tony,” his sister said gently, smiling at him. “Because it’s fun. Let’s have coffee in the study. There’s a fire there.”