“Not really,” he said, when I asked if he could tell me what was happening.

“The autopsy must be finished,” I said. “They released the body.”

“It’s finished.”

The verdict was cardiac arrest, caused by an overdose of a combination of medications, self-inflicted.

“What about Eric?”

“What about him.”

“You didn’t talk to him?”

“Listen up,” he said. “I’m driving the bus here. Not you. Now, you can be an asset or you can be a liability. Your call.”

I apologized.

“You’re going to have to take my word on this, all right? But based on the information we have so far, it’s pretty clear that Ms. Spielmann took her own life.”

I said nothing, thinking of her last, lonely hours on earth.

“I know it’s not an easy thing to accept,” he said. “For what it’s worth, I can tell you cared about her a lot.”

His tone, just shy of sincere, raised my antennae. I wanted to get off the phone, but I hadn’t yet asked my second question. In trying to make the segue sound natural, I ended up stuttering like a ham actor. “Uh—thank you. I app—thanks, but—detective? One more—sorry. One thing, about her thesis, the thesis. Do you think I might be able to get that back anytime soon?” I paused. “I need it, you see, for research purposes.”

A brief silence.

“I’m working as fast as I can,” he said.

“Of course. Only that it’s rather important, and if the case is closed—”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Well, but you said it’s clear what happened.”

“I said it’s pretty clear.”

I had to hand it to the man: he knew how to split a hair. “A ball-park estimate, then,” I said.

A longer silence.

“It mostly depends on when I get it back from the translator,” he said.

“... you’re having it translated.”

“My German’s a little rusty.”

I pressed my fist against my forehead. “I see. Well ... well, I could help you out with that, if you wanted.”

“That’s nice of you to offer, but we got it covered.”

“Anything I can do to help.”

“Duly noted,” he said. “Happy holidays.”

So agreeable was I that I stopped at a women’s boutique to buy Yasmina a gift. Of everything on offer, a ruby pendant set in yellow gold was the clear favorite. I balked momentarily when I saw the price tag—twenty-six hundred dollars—but I reminded myself that I had to strike while the iron was hot, and worst-case scenario I could always raid the vanity again for more things to sell. I had the pendant gift-wrapped, signed the note with love from Confucius, and shipped it to her parents’ house.

On December 24, after making the requisite call home, I transferred my dinner from tins to plates, poured myself a large glass of champagne, and carried everything on a tray to the dining-room table, which I had set for myself for the first time, a gesture I thought appropriately festive.

On December 27, Yasmina called.

“What do you think you’re doing.”

“Beg pardon?”

“You can’t do this.”

“Happy Hanukkah,” I said.

“You can’t, Joseph.”

“If you don’t like it, I can take it back.”

“Whether I like it or not is beside the point.”

“Do you?”

“Seriously. What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Wear it.”

“Oh, please.”

“Consider it a gesture of friendship.”

“Oh please.”

“You think it’s an unfriendly gesture?”

“I think I’m engaged.”

“That’s a start,” I said. “Before you were certain.”

“Uch, will you please, please stop.”

“I’m trying to woo you with brazen displays of largesse,” I said. “I don’t know, I feel like it’s working.”

“It’s not.”

“So you don’t like it.”

“Of course I like it. It’s gorgeous.”

“Then it’s working.”

“Joseph ...” Her voice dropped. “Shit. I have to go.”

“Wait.”

“I’ll call you later.”

“Mina—”

She hung up. I smiled, then opened the refrigerator door and reached for the remaining champagne.

We were walking in a giant emporium, like Wal-Mart but far larger, with shelving so high it seemed to bow inward, stocked to the edges with colorful items of all types, sporting equipment, cleaning products, children’s toys, all outsize and nuclear bright. The two of us were pushing a rattling shopping cart twice my height, grabbing item after item down off the shelf. The cart would not fill up; we kept reaching for more; and the rattling grew louder and lower, a monstrous gastrointestinal sound like a demolition derby. I asked her to wait; I needed a break; I couldn’t bear it any longer. She kept on going without me, though, and I screamed at her to stop, one second of quiet and rest; on she pushed, headed for the end of the aisle, and I knew that if I didn’t catch her soon, I never would. I felt around for something to throw, not at her but near enough to get her attention and make her realize that I’d fallen behind. I came up with a china saucer but hesitated, throwing a saucer is wrong, you can’t go around destroying perfectly good saucers. Up ahead she had begun to make the turn; it was now or never; and I coiled up and let loose. Away the saucer sailed, careening off the shelves, touching off chaos wherever it struck, boxes and products flying everywhere, plastic and cardboard in traffic-cone orange and coolant green, everything raining down, burying me, blacking out my last sight of her.

Five thirty-three A.M. and breaking glass.

Eyes open. Chest prickling with perspiration. Outside, charcoal morning: the backyard, the quince tree peeled bare, the fence open, and there, something else, light knifing across the grass, its origin a downstairs room, its origin the library. Someone was in the house, I knew who it was, he was here.

I reached for my bathrobe, took a poker from the fireplace, and crept downstairs. An icy draft led me to the back room, my old room, where I saw the leaded panel with the hunting scene smashed clean out. I reached down, touched one of the larger shards. The hunter’s cap. Or was it the deerskin? I could not tell. Now they were indistinguishable, beauty become trash. I turned on my haunches, trembling with rage.

I expected him to jump up as I came into the library, but he sat there placidly, in the middle of the carpet, surrounded by crumpled paper, bent covers, loose ripped spines, looking like some deranged scholar. He had pulled down, and destroyed, the better part of a dozen shelves.

“Get up,” I said.

His hand moved beneath a splayed facedown book and came up holding Alma’s pistol.

“No,” he said. “You sit down.”

It is interesting how many calculations your brain performs in a moment like that. The distance to him; the distance to the door; the weight of the poker in my hand; the probability that the gun was loaded, multiplied by the probability that it still worked. The numbers clanked and whirred, but no solution came. I sat in one of the easy chairs.

“Put it on the floor.”

I put the poker down.

“Give it here.”

I did.

“Good,” he said. “Now we can have a conversation.”

I said nothing.

“I can’t find the checkbook.”

“I threw it out,” I said.

He frowned. “Why’d you do that.”

“It’s worthless,” I said. “They’re in her name.”

He stared at me. “Why’d I come here, then.”

I didn’t think that merited an answer.

“Well,” he said, “that sucks.”

I said nothing.

“It’s really cold out there, you know.”

I said nothing.

“Really cold,” he said again. “She always liked it to be like a freezer in here. I used to walk around in fifteen layers. Can you imagine? She didn’t care, though.”

I said nothing.

“I know it was for her thing and blah blah. But a little human decency, you know? That’s the problem with people like you.”

I said nothing.

He said, “Take off your clothes.”

I did not move.

He pointed the gun at my chest.

I stood up and removed my robe.

Silence.

He was waiting for me.

I took off my pajama bottoms.

“You’re not done yet.”

I stood naked before him.

“Are you cold?”

I said nothing.

He looked at my genitals. “You look cold.” He laughed. “Sit down.”

“You can have the jewelry,” I said.

“And you can go fuck yourself,” he said.

Silence.

I sat. Against my skin the upholstery felt like sand.

“So, come on. Let’s talk about something.”

Silence.

I said, “What do you want to talk about?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Let’s see.” He thought. “Okay. How bout this. Did you ever think about her when you jacked off?”

I said nothing.

“Did you?”

“You’re disgusting.”

He laughed.

“You were an embarrassment to her,” I said.

“Maybe,” he said.

“You’re a failure.”

“Maybe. But I don’t know, man. I mean, look at us. Which one of us would you say is the failure?”

I said nothing.

“Say, ‘You’re right, Eric.’”

I said nothing.

“Say it.”

“You’re right.”

“‘You’re right, Eric.’”

“You’re right, Eric.”

“‘You’re right, sir.’”

“You’re right, sir.”

“Say, ‘I’m a piece of shit.’”

“... I’m a piece of shit.”

“Louder, please.”

“I’m a piece of shit.”

“Say, ‘I’m a douchebag.’”

“I’m a douchebag.”

“‘Who thinks about dead old women when he jacks off.’”

I said nothing.

“Aw, you were doing so well.”

I said nothing, and he came at me and jammed the barrel of the gun under my chin, causing me to gag.

“Speak. ”

I could not. He pushed and I gagged again, and he smiled and as he did his head went back a few degrees, like Alma’s used to do when she was tickled by something, and I felt the gun loosen and my body rose up out of the chair and I crashed down on top of him, naked and burning and slick with sweat, I the bigger man, twice his size, he seemed to disappear beneath me, spraying hot spittle and his arms against my chest like power lines snapped and writhing in the road. Click I heard, click click click like a broken typewriter. He had miscalculated and so instead he slammed it, the gun, he slammed it twice and twice more against the side of my head and the world sucked out like the retreating tide and foamed in like the advancing tide and he broke atop of me, beating me about the face as I groped for the poker, my fingers closing around paper, crushing it by the handful and came the butt of the gun hard against my spine, a hollow sound of metal on skin on bone. He was going to kill me. I recognized this. My brain said it. It said He is going to kill you. Then it added unless you get up. I got up. He was swinging wildly at me then, and it is in part due to his imprecision that I was able to make it to my feet, skating blurrily away from him through the pile of books, sliding through torn paper. He ran at me. I reached out with my long country boy’s limbs and took him by the arm and used his own momentum to swing him toward the mantel. He was so thin and light that I imagined (for it must have been my imagination, it could not have really happened) that his feet left the ground and for an instant he became a graceful thing, a thing in flight. His head came whipping round after his body and cracked against the plaster and I released him, he wobbled on his feet, he looked drunk like we had both been that night in the bar, the two of us together. We had nothing in common. We really could not be more different I thought as I took hold of the nearest object which was the half-head of Nietzsche.

You’re probably seen Nietzsche before. If you haven’t, let me describe him for you. The only part of him that matters, of course, is his moustache, which in early photos looks like a standard nineteenth-century version of a moustache, cigar-thick and smoke-black and vaguely pubic. A normal person might have stopped there, tending and grooming and restricting it to within the bounds of convention, but Nietzsche was of course anything but normal, and so he continued to let the moustache go and by middle age it had begun to turn up at the ends like wings, or some kind of alien punctuation mark. Everyone claims to understand Nietzsche but few do. I have always thought that one could correlate the loosening of his mind with the growth of his moustache. A good subject for a paper, not for a philosopher perhaps but for an intellectual historian with a sense of humor. Nietzsche had a mental collapse at the age of forty-five, no one knows exactly what brought it on but legend has it that he saw a man whipping a horse and lost his mind. This story is almost certainly apocryphal. He spent the last eleven years of his life confined to an institution. In the final two years he did not speak at all. During that time the moustache—by then a fearsome thing—took over his face completely, and we may choose to regard it (unruly, impenetrable) as the most precise expression of his lattermost thoughts. It’s something to behold, Nietzsche’s moustache, and one renders it in iron as a half a mushroom cap. Halved, this half-cap becomes a quarter cap, sharp at the end, like a tomahawk. Eric said nothing when I hit him with it. There was an eggshell sound and then he fell down. I thought of him threatening Alma and threatening me and maligning me and sickening her and barging into my house and interfering with my life and making me feel scared and breaking my window and taking away my words and replacing them with his own which were stupid and foul and unintelligent; correction: I didn’t think these things but I saw them swarming before me and I swung at them to clear the air, I cleared my mind of twenty years. There was no need for words. He had long stopped making any noise at all and so had his skull, which was soft and forgiving when I struck it one more time.

What became of you in those moments amazes you. You call yourself a thinker, but for a brief time you were altogether physical, your strength and fury as shocking as they were manifest. Having read widely, you know in a physiological sense what took place: the glands that contracted and the hormones that spurted and the twittering neural circuitry governing fight/flight; know, in the abstract, of analogous cultural phenomena, Norse berserkers and Bacchic revelry and Aztec orgies of violence and Pentecostal glossolalia to cite but a few examples of spiritual madness whose practitioners claim to be privy in their frenzy to flashes of godliness and superhumanity, phenomena well documented and thoroughly dissected in the annals of sociology, psychology, history, archaeology, anthropology, and the comparative study of religion, reams of serious-minded scholarly prose demonstrating when and why and how people excite themselves into such a state, and moreover drawing inferences for the broader implications of such behavior vis-à-vis human nature, nurture, culture, et al. You’ve read. You have mapped these ideas on paper but never in three dimensions; and now that you have, you are entirely present, brimming with sensation, so awake and alert and sensitive to reality that it’s excruciating just to stand there, alive. The yellow of the lamps is the yellowest imaginable. The air tangy and viscous like seawater. Your belly roars with a hunger akin to sexual ecstasy. You are present; you have acted. Who will believe you, when you do not believe it yourself?

Torn open all over, you feel no pain. Gather your clothes, an old molted skin. Books are everywhere, everywhere destroyed. He has done this. You turn toward him in hatred and see again what has become of him, the gray crater staring eyeless at the fireplace, and your stomach kicks and you rush to the toilet jackknifed just in time. When it is over the silence fills up with a high-pitched whine that drives your head between your knees, and you remain there a long time, first deciding what needs to be done and then girding yourself to do it and you stand wiping thick slime from your upper lip and when the water stops running you hear it: a mournful gypsy melody, a song of love and death. She is on time, as usual, headed for the library, where she now begins her workday, on your orders, so as not to wake you up upstairs.

Step into the hallway and through the open door see: the heaving bosom and the birthmark and the drab denim skirt and the permanently soiled apron and the blouse cut far too low for a woman her age. In her hair a comb, plastic colored to look like tortoiseshell. She is framed by the breaking day, a light with thickness and texture and unique refractive properties, making her appear as though set in glass, suspended like a trinket inside a paperweight, staring at the floor and the mess you’ve made, she’s never seen such a mess in her life. From her cowy mouth comes an unearthly sound, starting low and ascending smoothly until it hits a certain pitch and begins to hitch, hitch, hitch like a chuffing piston, hovering in a weird vocalic triangle between u and o and e, approximating what would technically be called the open-mid central rounded vowel, a term you know because you have taken several courses in linguistics. Ueoww, waving her fat hands in front of her fat stupid face. Ueohh ueohh ueooowww. Though appalling, the noise serves a clear purpose, awakening you to what is happening now, in this instant, here, in this place.

You say her name.

She looks at you, and her face seems to push into itself. Hers is a consummate disgust. This is America. She thought you was nice man. She say you boss. But what are you now except a filthy streaked savage with a good vocabulary? And she won’t stop making that noise. You say her name again and take a step toward her, and now she lets out an honest-to-goodness scream, an extended twelve-tone aria of pure terror. Before this you’ve never really understood what’s meant by “bloodcurdling.” Because the sound she makes really does cause you to feel your insides congealing, and for a third time you say her name but she is not to be reasoned with, screaming as she comes jousting at you with the hook end of the poker. Back you go, tangling with her abandoned vacuum and landing hard on your tailbone, grabbing at her ankle as she rumbles past. It’s eighteen long and short feet down the hall and all you need is for her to stop screaming long enough for you to explain, you chase her into the living room saying her name. The poker swings at you and you catch it with reflexes you didn’t know you had and yank hard and she is near and your arm catches her around the waist spinning waltz-like and down you both go rolling around together on the living-room floor, along the way kneecapping one of two brass lamps. She smells like detergent and chamomile. What must this look like, you wonder. In a way, it must be quite funny. If only she’d be quiet. That’s all you really need. What will the neighbors think? You can explain exactly what happened and why, but first she has to shut up. You pry the poker out of her hands and fling it away, trying to hold her shoulders so that you can look her in the eye and order her to calm down, but she isn’t listening to you anymore, nosir, she’s got her own agenda now and she won’t quiet down long enough for you to get your point across, and when you put your hand over her mouth not to hurt her but to briefly stopper the noise driving you mad with fear, she bites your hand eyewateringly hard, blunt nails scratching your face; for God’s sake she’s trying to claw out your eyes. What is wrong with her. This doesn’t involve her, none of it does, and you don’t need her to get involved, you just need her to stop screaming right now, it is a need larger than the sun. Grab her arms and pin them down and hang on to her like she is a steer. Her advantage is viciousness, she’ll try anything, every dirty crafty trick in the book. Your advantage is size. This is something you have always had: mass. One knee on her chest and then the other and she is subdued, thrashing weakly, her heels kicking back against the floor. Listen to me. You are trying to explain, trying to win her over with words, listen to me, listen. Listen. But look at her now. She makes a face. Some part of you recognizes that you must be hurting her. Is it a decision or something that happens? Is it something you do or something that is done? Who is the agent; what is the verb? Because you aren’t moving at all, you’re staying right where you are, and her eyes grow large and you understand what is happening to her—or did you understand already, when you chose to remain there, in place, your knees bearing down, twin anvils on her fifty-year-old heart. She makes a noise like an iron releasing steam and her stare is all white and her head falls back, exposing her throat, and you stay there until you stand up and face the silence anew, an additional problem on your hands.

This, now?

It is absurd.

It cannot be real.

But here is a hand.

And here is another.

Whatever excuses you might have had before are gone now. The choice is binary.

Go on.

Or stop.

You are so afraid.

Look back and the past telescopes to this very moment; look forward and the future is clear. You are not ready to ask yourself questions. You will need to lay out context, to provide a theoretical framework; and that will have to wait, as the abstract now yields to the very concrete.

Gather what you need. She has left the rest of her supplies in the entry hall. Bottle of ammonia, can of solvent. In the kitchen hang a sloshing bucket in the crook of your elbow. Tuck a mop under your arm. Peel off trash bags. Take sponges.

Aside from the books, the carpet has caught the worst of it. The stains have dried rapidly, forming lots of hard little specks and a few puck-sized patches, black fibers gummed together as though cauterized. Paper towels dissolve, useless. What you need is a good old-fashioned rag. You take off your robe. It stinks of exertion and fear and you dip its hem into the bucket, by now warm and scummy, afloat with all manner of unidentifiable black bits. The urge to vomit comes and goes. Your throat hurts from retching. Your solar plexus aches. Your eyes want to go to the faceless face, and to prevent this you look down, only down. Squeeze the excess out of the robe and back to work, scrubbing. It isn’t really working, is it. You can’t tell. Your vision is blurry, blink that away. It occurs to you that the stains may have gone all the way through to the floor. With trepidation you lift the corner and run your hand over the herringbone. Clean. Dry. Remember that this is a nice carpet, really nice, fine quality, the pile thick enough to absorb your sins. Lay the corner down and put your back into it.

Oh but the books. Many cannot be saved. You try to wipe them clean but of course that doesn’t work; it has soaked through the old paper, passing deep into the text. Blotches on the frontispiece echo through the third chapter. To see this twists your heart up like a wire. Some you have read; others you have pledged to read. Still others you have never considered opening, and it is only now, when you must let them go, that you appreciate their worth. Bravely you reinsert pages, restore torn corners, fill the body bags.

The green silk looks unscathed, which is a good thing, because you doubt anything would ever come out of that; and damage to a few square inches would have necessitated removal of an entire panel, of which there are three, two on either side of the fireplace running from floor to ceiling and one covering the area above the mantel. You might have had to throw it all out and repaint.

The lamp that might or might not be a Tiffany is intact.

The bluejays cry stop stop thief thief thief

You spend several minutes scrutinizing the easy chairs. The upholstery is dark enough that you might be able to get away with leaving them be. Better safe than sorry. You bend to pull up the cushions, catching, as you do, a glimpse of the face, not a face.

And again, on your knees, over the bucket. Some time later the feeling passes and you stand, exhausted and at the edge of yourself. Without looking at him, you drape a trash bag over his upper half.

You vacuum.

You carry everything to the service porch, empty the bucket into the large plastic basin sink, strip down, putting your ruined clothes in a trash bag.

Upstairs, you stand beneath the hot water. The runoff is pink. You rub yourself raw with a washcloth, turn the temperature up until the gashes in your flesh are bleached clean. Then you cut the water and stand in a column of steam, tingling with purpose, making plans.

Dry, anoint, and dress. Aside from the cuts to your body, which sting but are of no real concern, she has left her mark on your face, three jagged trenches dug deep into the flesh below your right eye. You reach for a box of bandages, then reconsider. Which is less conspicuous: the injury or the dressing? You wish you had some makeup. But whatever she kept in the vanity you have long thrown away. It’s your vanity, isn’t it, and what use does a grown man have for makeup? You never need anything until you need it. Isn’t that the truth. You put the bandages on and go downstairs.

The situation calls for tea, which you make with two teabags and heaping spoonfuls of sugar plus the juice of an entire lemon. You make a list, check it several times. Today, you are setting out on a journey—you have already lost sight of the shore—and the fear of having not taken into account some undoing detail dogs you.

Go on.

Go.

Her keys are in the pocket of her apron.

To your surprise, the station wagon starts beautifully. You ease down the driveway. It has been a long time since you’ve been behind the wheel, any wheel, and Boston drivers are notoriously aggressive. A college friend who grew up around here told you once that he learned to parallel park by backing up until he hit the bumper of the car behind him. He called it “kissing.” To him this was perfectly normal. You think about this now as you cruise the neighborhood in a widening spiral, looking for a parking spot that isn’t metered, insanely tight, or restricted by permit. Maybe you ought to put the car in a pay lot. But that’s no good: they’ll have a record of you coming in and out. You can’t have that. Keep looking until a mile away, you find a space that suits your needs. You read the signs and go, praying to a God you haven’t believed in in years.

Your first stop is the ATM. There you withdraw several hundred dollars in cash. You don’t feel too good about this; it is one of the many potential flaws in your plan, which is, of necessity, ad hoc. You try to avoid looking at the camera set behind the tiny one-way mirror, wondering then if avoiding the camera actually appears more suspicious than gazing directly at it or, better yet, trying to seem as though you haven’t given any consideration at all to being caught on camera. To appear relaxed, you whistle. Do ATM cameras capture sound? The machine is taking forever, making an exasperated noise, as though it has to print the money from scratch, and suddenly you become aware of the bandages on your face. You can feel the glue holding them there. This should be impossible, because the bandages are static, and the only way you ought to be able to feel anything is if they were moving against your skin; but their weight is there, it’s like a giant leech. You want to rip them off but of course you can’t and it’s hell, keeping still. Take your cash and your receipt and go, peeling off the bandages and casting them into the gutter, sickened by your own foolishness.

Next a hardware store. You buy a shovel. It costs twenty-four dollars and ninety-seven cents plus tax. You are tempted to buy other items as well but you have decided that the thing to do is spread your activity over a wide area. The cashier, a pretty girl named GRETA, says it looks like snow. You smile and nod but say nothing because you don’t want to lodge in her memory. Then you worry that by not answering you will look like a creepy mute, thus lodging in her memory, so you say something to the effect of what a surprise. And though you did not intend to be funny she laughs in a distinctly flirtatious way. You follow her eyes with your eyes but she never glances in the direction of the gashes on your face and you feel better. Maybe you look more normal than you think. It might be that they are not as prominent as you think; perhaps you are suffering from a distortion in self-perception, the kind that causes anorexics to see themselves as fat or teenagers to believe that the zit on their chin, no bigger than a period, has swallowed their entire head. Or maybe, though, she’s simply being polite; after all, it’s rude to stare. Maybe her eyes went straight there (seeking out imperfection, as eyes tend to do) before moving away as her social training kicked in; although if such a thing had occurred, and she did see the cuts, and this had given her pause, could she really be smiling and joking with you in such a perfectly casual way &c., all this emotional yoyoing being quite hard on your heart, which has to keep shifting gears. You pay and thank her and walk out.

You don’t want to be seen carrying a shovel, which in urban Cambridge looks like a stage prop, so you go home, stopping along the way to purchase concealer. You leave the shovel in the library, then stand in the bathroom, dabbing makeup below your right eye. It stings as it goes on. It’s not a professional job but it will do for now.

Near the cantina where you had your birthday party, there’s a shop that specializes in travel books. It is hilariously comprehensive. The only time you actually purchased anything here was before your trip to Germany. The choice you faced then was paralyzing: all manner of guidebooks, designed for travelers of every cultural and socioeconomic stripe. Hip pseudonarratives for backpackers. Upscale guides to East Berlin couture. You went low-budget, buying one of a series written by local students and updated every year by a fresh round of unsuspecting field agents who vow never to do that again after a hostel in Croatia leaves them with what their pediatrician back home calls without a doubt the nastiest case of scabies he’s ever seen. You know this because you used to teach these students and they used to tell you. You had frank and open relationships with them. You held your office hours in a café and always someone came, if not to ask questions, then to shoot the breeze. Sophomores had crushes. Your sections were coveted. For three years you TFed introductory logic, as well as Kant and the Enlightenment Ideal; once you applied to teach a seminar on indecision. That was the title you proposed: On Indecisiveness. Your so-called advisor turned you down, proposing that what you really wanted to do was work out your own hang-ups in front of a captive audience. Maps of New England shingle a wire rack. You find one that unfolds to the size of a picnic table, detailing roads all the way to the Canadian border. You pay your thirteen ninety-five plus tax and yes, please, a bag would be good.

The office-supply store sells three-cubic-foot cardboard boxes for two twenty-nine apiece plus tax. You estimate the station wagon’s cargo area and settle on six. They’re an ordeal to carry, six flattened boxes along with a roll of clear packing tape and a black permanent marker. The only way to do it is to pin the boxes to your flanks as you walk, taking short, shuffling steps so as not to lose your grip on the slippery cardboard, the surface of which seems to have been finished with a kind of wax. It takes you a while to get home. Plus you’ve got the map (in a high-quality paper bag with twisted paper handles and the artfully weathered logo of the store imprinted on the side) to contend with. All the cash transactions have left your pockets swinging heavily with change. You arrive home winded, your mood black. But you must go on.

Catch the bus across the river, where you enter a store that sells camping equipment. Along the back wall is a supernumerary array of hiking boots. A lanky boy comes over to dispense wisdom. Hardcore, he says when you tell him you’re taking a winter backpacking trip. He sells you your third pair of new footgear this year, as well as down-filled nylon pants and high-tech gloves and a parka and a rugged backpack and a box of plastic packets that produce heat when twisted. They go inside your gloves, he explains.

The total comes to about thirteen hundred dollars. You hand him your credit card but it comes back. You have exceeded your limit. You exceeded it when you bought new shirts and new pants and cufflinks and a ruby pendant, and so you ask the boy to hold your purchases and go off in search of another ATM.

The first one you come across doesn’t allow you to take out more than five hundred dollars at a time. All right, then, you’ll do it three times. Again the machine stops you in your tracks: you have reached your limit for the day. You tingle unpleasantly. Does “limit for the day” mean the calendar day, meaning midnight, or a twenty-four-hour period, in which case you’re going to have to wait until morning? Either way, you can’t wait that long. You’re going to have to make an unscheduled stop at the bank.

The lady behind the desk at a nail salon directs you to a branch five blocks away. You hightail it there and get into what feels like a conga line at an old-age home. Only one window is open. You hold back bleats of impatience and when you finally do make it up to the window, the teller asks if you want that as a cashier’s check and you say cash, please, twenties. This causes her to stare at you in a harrowing way, and you wonder if she’s going to call the police or hit the button for the silent alarm. Then you realize that she’s annoyed at having to count it all out. Which is highly inappropriate: they’re a bank, giving out money is their job. If you were of a different state of mind and less pressed for time, you’d ask to see the manager.

Back at the camping store, the boy has got everything all packed up and ready to go, which seems to you a remarkable act of faith on his part. You tell him that upon further consideration, you don’t need those hand warmers after all. They work great, he says. You’re sure they do, but no, thanks. He shrugs and fishes them from the bottom of the bag, saving you sixteen dollars and ninety cents. Every little bit counts. When you lay out the stack of bills, he goggles.

Near the building where you lived briefly with nymphomaniacs is a purveyor of cheap housewares. The salesman encourages you to go for something heavier than the lightweight duvets you have chosen. They won’t really keep a body warm, he says. That’s all right, you say.

Your final errand run takes you to a second drugstore. You fill a basket with the following: lighter fluid, matches, a box of latex exam gloves, ten rolls of duct tape, trash bags, a jumbo package of baby wipes, and a large bottle of double-caffeinated soda. For appearances’ sake, you have also thrown in a fishing magazine. The total comes to sixty-one eighty-five plus tax. You’d like to pay with some of your abundant loose change but that’s not a way to remain inconspicuous, making people count nickels.

Outside, it has begun to snow, big flakes like nonpareils.

At home you stand in the entry hall, brushing yourself off. You close your eyes and dream up contingencies. The vanity of this soon dawns on you: there are an infinite number of them. You could make them up all day long. You might as well accept that something could go wrong, because if you’re not willing to accept that, then you’re not really willing to go on. And you must go on. It is four o’clock in the afternoon. You go upstairs and close the blinds and set your alarm for seven P.M. You lie down fully clothed and fall into a dreamless sleep.

The air in the library has grown fetid. (Is this possible? Does it happen so fast?) Begin by taking everything out of their pockets. He has a single house key and a bent promotional postcard for a rock band and a state ID with an address in Quincy and a parole card and a phone and a small amount of cash. Her cellular phone is lipstick-red and chipped. You set it aside, adding her thirty-one dollars to his sixteen, folding the bills into your back pocket. Every little bit counts. Her wallet contains coupons, a driver’s license, a library card, which last amazes you. Unduly: for why should she not read? (Because you cannot allow yourself to conceive of her as anything other than an object.) She lives, lived, in Roxbury. You never knew. You will yourself to unknow it.

Her skirt peels up as you drag her out of the way. Thighs the color of suet, convenience-store briefs, a sparse gray fringe protruding. Once she’s moved, you make her decent again.

You spread out one of the duvets. Being thinner, he moves more easily, although in the process the trash bag slips off, exposing what you still cannot bear to see; and you have a moment where you can’t go on. But you must. You position him parallel to the short end of the duvet, roughly four-fifths of the way down its length. Crouch down, head averted and mouth tightly shut, and fold over the edge of the duvet, covering him. Roll him over. It’s difficult. He is non-compliant, dead weight ha ha ha. The smell is impossible to describe, don’t even try. Curse yourself for having forgotten to purchase a surgical mask. You’re going to need another shower by the time this is done. Over and over he goes, on a bias, so that instead of a neat, even burrito you’ve formed a kind of cone. Back up and start again. And once more. There. That ought to do.

Now you duct tape like it’s going out of style, resulting in something that resembles a silver cocoon or, more accurately, a chrysalis.

You unpack the second duvet and repeat the process with her.

She is noticeably larger. The lack of symmetry bothers you. Nevertheless you regard your chrysalises as things of beauty. A vision comes to you: they erupt, two new creatures formed from the soup of what used to be him and what used to be her, winged, magnificent, ethereal, flapping off into the sky, taking your troubles away.

While you linger in this fantasy, her phone goes off with a mighty blast of trumpets. Scrape yourself off the ceiling and look at the screen: ANDREI. Her husband? Son? Pimp? Who knows. You wait until it stops ringing, then check the missed calls.

There are six.

This concerns you. Has she mentioned the name of the man who pays her sixty dollars to clean house? (Does she even know your name?) Does she keep her schedule written down? In an accessible place? As you cannot answer the questions, nor hope to alter the actualities underlying those answers, you set them aside and concentrate on what you can control. You turn their phones off.

Ten thirty-two P.M., and you’re behind schedule. It’s a good thing you slept three hours instead of four or five. You’ve needed the extra time. Constant activity has prevented you from confronting what you have done; nor have you given much consideration to the alternative, which now stands before you as you go to the kitchen to start assembling cardboard boxes: the phone. Look at it. It is still possible to pick it up and dial. But is it? No. Not anymore. Or perhaps they would understand, if you explained to them the expression on his face, the pressure of the gun against your throat. The gun wasn’t loaded, but he could have jumped you from behind and strangled you or—or—or what about this: he could have hit you with the bookend. Or the poker. Anything was possible, and you can talk, you have always been able to talk; pick up the phone; it would be so easy, wouldn’t it; would obviate all this effort, free you of so many burdens. If you do not, your night has only just begun.

Go on.

Two by two you carry the assembled boxes to the library, where you fill each with ruined books, not all the way to the top but enough so that they won’t go flying everywhere or feel unnaturally light, should anyone want to pick them up—not that that will happen. Why would it? You must believe it won’t. Sealing the boxes with packing tape, you label each one either BOOKS LIVING ROOM or BOOKS MASTER BEDROOM.

You jog through the streets, through the gentle snow.

Her car is right where you left it and your heart stops: a parking ticket. How is that possible? You checked the signs. You read for content. Then you see that it isn’t a ticket but a leaflet advertising a two-for-one tapas brunch. Angrily you tear it into bits, resolving to never, ever eat at that restaurant.

For someone who cleans for a living, her car is a hellacious mess. Standing beneath a gas station overhang, surrounded by curtains of snow, you rid it of everything belonging to her: unopened soda cans, smeared newspapers. A bit of jiggering gets the second row of seats down, leaving the cargo area empty and flat. You pay for your gas and ask for two tree-shaped air fresheners, both in Royal Pine.

Despite your bang-up mummification job, the stench in the library seems to have worsened. You gag as you crouch down beside her. Slip your hands under her. It’s hard to get purchase, because the tape is so taut and smooth. It’s your own fault for being thorough. What you need is a handle; and so you use duct tape to fashion one, drawing inspiration from the bookstore bag’s twisted paper handles. Gingerly you raise her up—she bends a little, but less than you expected—and give her a test jounce. Solid.

Go.

Deep breath and open the library door and drag her down the hall and into the living room and down the hall again and across the kitchen and into the service porch, the linoleum helping you along, outside and thudding down the frosted wooden steps and drop her in the snow with a powdery whup. Butterfingered, you fumble out the keys to the station wagon and raise the rear hatch. Sit on the bumper, then bend over and pick up the handle and row backward, scooting yourself into the cargo area with your neck and body bent over sideways, you’re too damned tall but you do it, you get her mostly up, and when she is half in and stable, you climb carefully out the passenger door and hurry around to the back and push her the rest of the way in. You would never have guessed how awkward this is. She won’t move like you want her to; she is heavy and stiff. You lower the hatch without closing it and go back for round two.

With him everything’s chugalugging along dandily until you get to the top of the exterior steps and the handle rips loose and you go tail over teakettle into the snow. There’s no time to fix it; scramble back up and pull him bodily until he’s on the ground, then squat down and slip your arms underneath him and the cold burns and your lower back yodels and you get up, staggering around. The hatch is closed. Why couldn’t you have left it up. And so you have to drop him again. When the hatch is open, you squat and lift again, ignoring the pain. You get him in semi-straight but this isn’t the time to be concerned about aesthetics; you’re out there in the open and you glance at the windows of the neighboring house, miraculously still unlit. Run back to the library and grab the third duvet. It hides them both with room to spare, although to your eye it’s more than obvious what’s underneath. To solve this problem you go back into the house and collect the pillows from the downstairs bedroom. They do nicely to fill in the gaps, smoothing the two lumps into a solid mass, sort of like an air mattress. Why you would be transporting an air mattress, you have no idea. If pressed, you would use the excuse that you needed padding to cushion the boxes of books that you intend to put on top of them, or else the boxes would bounce around, damaging their contents. In your head you practice delivering this explanation.

The first box fits, though you have to wedge it in, and you realize that if you fill up the entire cargo area, you’ll have obstructed your rearview mirror. Under normal circumstances that’s bad enough; in this case, it might be a fatal error. Recalibrating feverishly, you go inside and collect all the plastic bags from your long day of shopping. Indian-style on the kitchen floor, you use a chef’s knife to slice open all your nice, neat boxes, transferring the ruined books from the boxes to the bags, tying the bag handles twice so the contents won’t spill out. You use up all nineteen bags—exclusive of the paper bag from the bookstore, which still holds the map—and take them outside to place them atop the duvet. Now you’re talking. Now it looks like an amateur moving job, the exact impression you’re shooting for. You give yourself a mental high-five.

You’re still going to have to do something about the ruined carpet.

But not right now. The stove clock says one ten in the morning. You shower again, don your new cold-weather gear, and pack your (her) duffel with a change of clothes, including one pair of new shoes still in their soft drawstring bag.

The shovel. The bag with the map, to which you add their phones and both sets of identification. Lighter fluid and matches. Trash bags. Backpack. Soda. Fishing magazine. (Why not?) A flashlight. The knife, seems like a good idea. Put on your eleventh pair of latex gloves for the day and load up the car. The wind throws down snow from the branches. You zip up your parka. The shovel goes under the edge of the duvet, the garbage in back, everything else on the floor in front of the passenger seat. Road trip ready, you get behind the wheel and head north.

The rubbery beat of the windshield wipers.

Tiny explosions of snow.

It seems that the air fresheners are making the stench worse, calling attention to what they are intended to conceal. You toss them out, too. But you can’t drive with the smell building up like that, so you lower one of the rear windows an inch. Cold air rushes in behind you, a noise like a pursuing tornado. It keeps you alert, and the smell dwindles to a tolerable level.

At least the car has four-wheel drive—something you didn’t think about in advance. Luck or fate has saved you there.

I-95 runs all the way to New Brunswick, but you don’t go nearly that far, stopping north of Portland for food and fuel. The gas station is strung with tinsel. In the bathroom you remove the battery from his cell phone, dropping the phone itself in the trash. The battery you pocket.

The clerk wears a floppy Santa hat and a look of existential despair. You buy another green soda. So much caffeine must be unhealthy. It sure feels bad. Try not to look jittery as you take out more twenties. Gas alone will cost you several hundred dollars over the course of this trip, and it occurs to you that criminals, just like everyone else, must be feeling the recent increases at the pump. Everybody hurts during tough times, even the wicked. You almost giggle, right there in the middle of the mini-mart, to imagine mafiosi complaining of shrinking profit margins.

Before leaving town, you place the trash bags in an alley.

Alone on the road, with nothing to do but stare into the surging snow, you bury or shed or at least suspend the klaxon thought that you, too, are among the wicked.

For a while you hug the shoreline, running a string of quaint towns whose wreathed wooden homes evoke visions of ruddy-faced lobstermen and plump, jolly wives, everyone gathered round the fire, glugging eggnog, swapping presents, intoxicated with good cheer. Turning inland, you pass a sign for Kennebec County, population 117,114. In the last two hours you’ve seen three other cars, all going in the opposite direction. You toss his cell phone battery clattering onto the blacktop.

North again, a narrow road unspooling through the forest. The sun has started to send up shoots; iced-over ponds glimmer. That’s okay. You anticipated this. Your goal is a location remote enough that you won’t have to worry about operating in broad daylight. Consulting the map, another westward turn. The forest closes around you like a hand. Stop the car and get out and stand on the shoulder, playing the flashlight through the trees, your breath rising in great white balloons.

The snow is deep and inviting.

You should have sprung for the hand warmers.

Strap the shovel to your new backpack, tighten the laces on your boots. Put the high-tech gloves over your latex gloves. Open the hatch and push aside the books.

You have your doubts about the strength of her handle. On the fly, you decide to use the duvet as a kind of stretcher or sling by which to drag her.

This idea fails, spectacularly. After crashing down the embankment (much steeper than it looked; plus you land awkwardly on the shovel handle) you have to spend time digging her out and repositioning her. Even then, she won’t keep straight. The duvet grows heavy, starts to tear. This will never work. You overestimated yourself. You scramble up the embankment with the ruined duvet and exchange it for the knife.

She has sunk into the powder. You kneel beside her, cutting slits in the tape wide enough to work your gloved fingers into. Lean back and pull and walk backward. She comes. Slowly, but she comes. Okay. Good. Now we’re getting somewhere. Your fingers hurt and your back hurts, but you are moving, and that’s enough to power you on through the trees, smearing a trail that anyone could follow. Fifty feet. Your nylon pants make a swishing sound. A hundred feet. Owls low. Hundred fifty. Complexly woven branches render the sky a vast gray rosace. Smell the evergreens, dense stands of eastern white pine. Much better than your air fresheners. You wish you could chop down one of these tall soldiers and hang him from the rearview mirror. There’s less snow on the ground now, most of it clumped in needles overhead, like cotton bolls. Brown needles on the ground. Patches of ice; you slip and right yourself and pull on. Swish swish. Two hundred feet. That’s what they call Maine, isn’t it? “The Pine Tree State.” Your fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Yawkey made your social studies class memorize the state capitals and flowers and so forth. To keep your mind off the difficulty of the task at hand, you run through nicknames. Massachusetts: the Bay State. Vermont: the Green Mountain State. Swish swish. Three hundred feet; four. The only state without “state” in its nickname is New Mexico: Land of Enchantment. Focus on warm places. Florida: the Sunshine State. California: the Golden State. Hawaii: the Aloha State. Five. After Arizona: the Grand Canyon State, you set her down and catch your breath (it comes sharp and clean and electric), unstrap your shovel, and bend to dig.

Except you can’t. The earth is frozen. You strike at what feels like solid rock, and for the first time all day and night and day, frustration wells up to the point where you cannot contain it. With an animal howl you slam the shovel into the ground, the mud cracking into poker chips. You do this again and again, but nothing. It would take hours to clear even a few feet. What you need is a pickax, and since you don’t have one, you’re going to have to leave her here or else bring her all the way back through the forest, back through the snow, back up the embankment, the thought of which makes you want to surrender. You cast about for salvation and it comes, literally, in a ray of light: there: a hollow log. Go to it. You test it by getting down and crawling halfway in. Yes, it will work. You drag her to it, then cut off the duct tape, heeding the (unsubstantiated but intuitive) notion that she will decay faster this way. You unroll the duvet and out she comes, not reshaped and winged but the same as before, perhaps a little grayer.

You’re well past the urge to vomit but slipping your arms under her armpits does give you a bad moment. You wrestle her toward the log, smelling the deadness on her, feeling her clay through your gloves. On second thought you might not be totally done with vomiting yet. You get her head inside and then push her by her legs, bit by bit, her knees bending rustily, so slowly it’s going, so slow until at last you get her in up to her waist and that’s enough, enough already, enough, piling bark and twigs and pinecones and rocks and snow over the rest of her and pray that some scavenger gets to her soon, run.

Run, hobbled, sinking, wanting nothing but to get away from her. Ice in your socks and down your sleeves to your armpits cold and shocking but still you run, run, claw your way up the embankment and fall in the car seizing with terror and cold, calm down. You’re fine. Calm down. You’re hot, is what you are. Your fingers disobey you as you try to unzip your jacket, which is covered in dirt that might be from the ground or might be from someplace on her, you smell like her deadness. She is clinging to you, you must take off your jacket. Get it off. Get it off. Calm down. Your T-shirt is soaked. You can hardly see the road. The windshield is fogged. You cannot see. Calm down. Calm down. Look at the clock. Look. It’s seven in the morning. You’ve a whole lot left to do. Calm down. Calm down. Calm down and start the car. Start the car. Go on, start the car. Do it. Do it now, do it right now. Start the car. Drive. Go. Move.

Move.

The menu is in English and French. You order, then open the fishing magazine on the table in front of you, reading up on the Seven Secrets to Steelhead Success as you sip your coffee. You eat eggs and bacon and toast, and drink yet more coffee, finally rising to move your bowels in a filthy, frigid stall. On the way out of the bathroom you drop her cell phone in the trash, taking the battery with you.

The snow covering the meadow has turned to ice, a mixed blessing. On the one hand, he slides. On the other hand so do you, your feet skittering Chaplinesquely. Dig your heels in. What good are these boots? You need crampons. Oversight. Keep going. You pull. The station wagon starts to shrink in the distance. How far have you gone? Not far enough. The hard part is almost over. You should be fine. You will be fine. Go on. Move. Put your back into it. Swish swish go your pants, a steady 4/4. You’ve been working on the railroad, all the livelong day. You’ve been working on the railroad, just to pass the time away. Who would work on a railroad just to pass the time away? What kind of hobby is railroad work? It’s not like needlepoint or tennis, something you pick up out of boredom. Countless people died laying the first Transcontinental Railroad, many of them imported Chinese laborers, done in by brutal winters or accidental explosions. It’s no laughing matter. All those old songs make no sense. Why should you care if Jimmy crack corn? Why should anyone? Keep going. You once audited a course about folk songs and their relation to the unconscious. It’s taught by some imbecile. You should have gone to law school. The trees are close now. Keep pulling. The slits in the tape widen; pull any harder and they risk splitting open. Slow and steady wins the race. That’s nonsense, too, isn’t it? Just like the notion that cheaters never prosper. If this isn’t prosperity, you don’t know what is. Hahahahaha. Twenty-four hours ago he wasn’t this heavy. Your fingers are blistered. The tendons in the back of your hands are ready to snap. Nobody can endure what you’re enduring. You are the overman. You think of Nietzsche and his injunction to remake the world in one’s own image. You think of his moustache. He would have fit right in back at that diner, hahaha. Keep going. Swish swish. Davyyyyyyy, Davy Crockett. King of the wild frontier.

Once you reach the trees you keep walking backward until the light changes and changes again and you look up and see that you have come to a clearing. Above you the treetops rise like a crown, like the walls of a bottomless pit. You have seen this place before. You have seen it in your dreams, seen it painted on a piece of glass. It is unconcealed to you, now, aletheia. Look around and wonder.

Where is the deer?

Where is the hunter?

Which one are you?

You set him on fire.

Smoke rises through the trees.

Your relief is instantaneous. The pilgrimage is done, the offering elevated, and you would strip naked and run through the snow singing hymns.

But it’s never as simple as that, is it?

Because he burns for a few minutes and then, in an instant, he goes out.

The aroma is of grossly overdone pork, and you hold your breath as you douse him once again in lighter fluid. To speed the process you add handfuls of dry branches and leaves. You drop a match and away he goes.

This time he burns a little longer before going out.

The third try uses up the rest of the can and goes for fifteen minutes. You consider abandoning him there and then you hear a sound of approaching.

No point in running. You take down the shovel and grip it, waiting. Whoever it is, he or she has erred in deciding to walk in the woods this afternoon. Silence. Silence. And you move in a semicircle around the source of the noise, bringing into view, one hundred feet away, a lone, malnourished wolf.

He grins shaggily at you.

Hello, he says.

You take the crumpled duvet and back away. In the distance you see him slink out of the underbrush and crawl toward the smoking pile, sniffing interestedly at the remains.