Mortal Memory

sick.”

Rebecca’s eyes narrowed. “What kind of life are you talking about, Steve?” she asked, but warily, as if she were closing in on a dangerous animal she’d studied and knew well.

“A pinched, little life,” I said, brutally, the raw edge of my own vast discontent piercing through the mask behind which I’d hidden so long. “A dull, stupid life, with nothing in it that lifted him, that gave him hope, that had some possibility of escape.”

Rebecca’s face filled with recognition. “Escape from what?” she asked.

“From them” I blurted. “From the way they were killing him before he decided to take it by the balls … and kill them instead.”

The words seemed to hit her like bullets. She drew away from me, her eyes glaring fiercely. Her lips parted, but she didn’t speak. Instead, she closed her notebook with an abrupt finality.

“I think we can end it here,” she said, in a steely voice, her tone beyond any feeble gesture I might make at either apology or explanation.

I started to speak, but she rose instantly, walked to the door, and jerked it open. “I’ll send you all the materials I’ve collected on the case,” she said tensely.

I remained in my chair, my own last words washing over me like a hot wave.

“Rebecca, I …”

She remained at the door, her body rigid. “I’ll also send you a copy of the book,” she added.

I knew that all she might have felt for me before that moment—respect, esteem, perhaps even some affection—had been reduced to this single, brutal and explosive kernel. She’d seen the face of “these men” in my face, and there was no way for me to creep back into my former self.

And so I nodded to her as I passed, saw her eyes dart away, then stepped out into the rain.

FOURTEEN

I WALKED OUT into the rain, moving resolutely toward my waiting car. I didn’t glance back toward Rebecca’s cottage to see if she lingered by the door or watched me leave from behind the short white curtains of her tiny living room.

I could feel an immense emptiness within me, a sense of having been filled for a time, then gutted absolutely. As I drove down the curving road which led from Rebecca’s cottage, I felt that some part of me had been blasted away by the same fire that had taken my mother, my brother, and my sister to their isolated graves.

It was still raining heavily when I pulled onto the main road, the leaden drops coming toward me like a hail of silver bullets, splattering onto the hood and windshield of the car, sending small bursts of water back into the dense, nocturnal air.

For a while, I drove on determinedly, biting down on my aching emptiness, trying to remove all the preceding days from my mind. I wanted to forget that I’d ever met Rebecca Soltero, heard her voice, or entertained a single one of her darkly probing questions. I wanted to forget all that she’d unearthed in me, the hunger and dissatisfaction along with the gnawing, nearly frenzied, urge to burst out of the life my own choices had created, as if in one, explosive act I could erase and then reconstitute an existence which, without explosion, offered no way out.

The lights of Old Salsbury glimmered hazily through the weaving veils of rain. I swept through its slick, deserted streets, past shop windows crowded with blank-faced mannequins and on toward its prim outer wall of white Colonial houses. I felt my head drift backward almost groggily, my mind reeling drunkenly in a fog of pain. I had never known so deep an anguish, or experienced so complete a sense of irredeemable collapse.

The house was dark when I pulled into the driveway. For a time I didn’t go in, but remained in the car, instead, poised motionlessly behind the wheel, staring hollow-eyed at the black, unblinking windows. For a moment I closed my eyes, as if in an effort to make it all disappear, the whole intransigent structure of my life. When I opened them again, I realized that they were moist, glistening, that I had, against the force of my will, begun to cry.

I waited for a long time after that, waited to regain a stony composure. Then I got out of the car and walked toward the short flight of cement steps that led to the side entrance of the house. I could feel the rain slapping ruthlessly against me, but I walked slowly anyway, so that by the time I entered the house, my hair hung in a wet tangle over my forehead.

Down the corridor I could see a light burning softly, and for an instant, I thought that Marie must still be working in her office. Then I realized that the light was coming from farther down the hallway, from my office, rather than Marie’s.

She was sitting very erectly in the black leather chair behind my desk, the surreal outlines of my mythical dream house spread out before her. When she spoke to me, only her mouth seemed to move; the rest of her body, her arms, her hair, the clean, classically drawn lines of her face, everything else appeared to hold itself firmly within a marble stillness.

“Where have you been, Steve?” she asked.

“At the office, you know that.”

She shook her head firmly. “You weren’t at the office.”

“What are you talking about, Marie?”

She looked at me as if this last, despicable lie was hardly worthy of attention. “I went to the office,” she said.

I started to speak, but found that I had no words. I felt my lips part, but no sound came. I knew that I was helpless, literally naked, before her. She was armored in the truth, and I was a worm wriggling beneath its dark, approaching shadow.