Augustine. And herein lies my sickness.'
'That's a start. That's a crucial self-realization,' Eric said.
'I'm not talking about myself. I'm talking about you. Your whole waking life is a self-contradiction. That's why you're engineering your own downfall. Why are you here? That's the first thing I said to you when I came out of the toilet.'
'I noticed the toilet. It's one of the first things I noticed. What happens to your waste?'
'There's a hole below the fixture. I knocked a hole in the floor. Then I positioned the toilet so that one hole fits over the other.'
'Holes are interesting. There are books about holes.'
'There are books about shit. But we want to know why you'd willingly enter a house where there's someone inside who's prepared to kill you.'
'All right. Tell me. Why am I here?'
'You have to tell me. Some kind of unexpected failure. A shock to your self-esteem.'
Eric thought about this. Across the table the man's head was lowered and he held the weapon between his knees, using both hands to grip it. The stance was patient and thoughtful.
'The yen. I couldn't figure out the yen.'
'The yen.'
'I couldn't chart the yen.'
'So you brought everything down.'
'The yen eluded me. This had never happened. I became halfhearted.'
'This is because you have half a heart. Give me a cigarette.'
'I don't smoke cigarettes.'
'The huge ambition. The contempt. I can list the things. I can name the appetites, the people. Mistreat some, ignore some, persecute others. The self-totality. The lack of remorse. These are your gifts,' he said sadly, without irony.
'What else?'
'Funny feeling in your bones.'
'What?'
'Tell me if I'm wrong.'
'What?'
'Intuition of early death.'
'What else?'
'What else. Secret doubts. Doubts you could never acknowledge.'
'You know some things.'
'I know you smoke cigars. I know everything that's ever been said or written about you. I know what I see in your face, after years of study.'
'You worked for me. Doing what?'
'Currency analysis. I worked on the baht.'
'The baht is interesting.'
'I loved the baht. But your system is so microtimed that I couldn't keep up with it. I couldn't find it. It's so infinitesimal. I began to hate my work, and you, and all the numbers on my screen, and every minute of my life.'
'One hundred satang to the baht. What's your real name?'
'You wouldn't know it.'
'Tell me your name.'
He sat back and looked away. Telling his name seemed to strike him as an essential defeat, the most intimate failure of character and will, but also so inevitable there was no point resisting.
'Sheets. Richard Sheets.'
'Means nothing to me.'
He said these words into the face of Richard Sheets. Means nothing to me. He felt a trace of the old stale pleasure, dropping an offhand remark that makes a person feel worthless. So small and forgettable a thing that spins such disturbance.
'Tell me. Do you imagine that I stole ideas from you? Intellectual property'
'What does anyone imagine? A hundred things a minute. Whether I imagine a thing or not, it's real to me. I have syndromes where they're real, from Malaysia for example. The things I imagine become facts. They have the time and space of facts.'
'You're forcing me to be reasonable. I don't like that.'
'I have severe anxieties that my sex organ is receding into my body.'
'But it's not.'
'Shrinking into my abdomen.'
'But it's not.'
'Whether it is or not, I know it is.'
'Show me.'
'I don't have to look. There are folk beliefs. There are epidemics that happen. Men in the thousands, in real fear and pain.'
He closed his eyes and fired a shot into the floorboards between his feet. He didn't open his eyes until the report stopped vibrating through the room.
'All right. People like you can happen. I understand this. I believe it. But not the violence. Not the gun. The gun is all wrong. You're not a violent man. Violence is meant to be real, based on real motives, on forces in the world that what. That make us want to defend ourselves or take aggressive action. The crime you want to commit is cheap imitation. It's a stale fantasy. People do it because other people do it. It's another syndrome, a thing you caught from others. It has no history.'
'It's all history.' He said, 'The whole thing is history. You are foully and berserkly rich. Don't tell me about your charities.'
'I have no charities.'
'I know this.'
'You don't resent the rich. That's not your sensibility'
'What's my sensibility?'
'Confusion. This is why you're unemployable.'
'Y?
'Because you want to kill people.'
'That's not why I'm unemployable.'
'Then why?'
'Because I stink. Smell me.'
'Smell me,' Eric said.
The subject thought about this.
'Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others. In the old tribes the chief who destroyed more of his property than the other chiefs was the most powerful.'
'What else?'
'You have everything to live and die for. I have nothing and neither. That's another reason to kill you.'
'Richard. Listen.'
'I want to be known as Benno.'
'You're unsettled because you feel you have no role, you have no place. But you have to ask yourself whose fault this is. Because in fact there's very little for you to hate in this society.'
This made Benno laugh. His eyes went slightly wild and he looked around him, shaking and laughing. The laughter was mirthless and disturbing and the shaking increased. He had to put the weapon on the table so he could laugh and shake freely.
Eric said, 'Think.'
'Think.'
