A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The long-drawn-out death within life. The burial-alive of the mind, covering it over with fresh graveyard earth each time it tries to struggle through to the light. In this kind of death you never finish dying.

In back of them, over by the door, I see the top of someone’s head appear, then come forward, slowly, fearfully forward. Different from their short-clipped, starkly outlined heads, soft and rippling in contour, and gentle. And as she comes forward into fullface view, I see who she is.

She comes up close to me, stops, and looks at me.

“Then it wasn’t — you?” I whisper.

She shakes her head slightly with a mournful trace of smile. “It wasn’t me,” she whispers back, without taking them into it, just between the two of us, as in the days before. “I didn’t go there to meet you. I didn’t like the way you sounded.” But someone was there, I came across someone there. Someone whose face became hers in my waking dream. The scarf, the blood on the scarf. It’s not my blood, it’s not my scarf. It must belong to someone else. Someone they haven’t even found yet, don’t even know about yet.

The preventive has come too late.

She moves a step closer and bends toward me.

“Careful — watch it,” a voice warns her.

“He won’t hurt me,” she answers understandingly without taking her eyes from mine. “We used to be in love.”

Used to? Then that’s why I’m dying. Because I still am. And you aren’t anymore.

She bends and kisses me, on the forehead, between the eyes. Like a sort of last rite.

And in that last moment, as I’m straining upward to find her lips, as the light is leaving my eyes, the whole night passes before my mind, the way they say your past life does when you’re drowning: the waiter, the night maid, the taxi argument, the call girl, Johnny — it all meshes into start-to-finish continuity. Just like in a story. An organized, step-by-step, timetabled story.

This story.

Life Is Weird Sometimes...

Have you ever seen a woman die? I hope you never have to, never do. I mean in violence, at your own hands. It isn’t a good thing to see. When you see a man die, you see only yourself not someone apart whom you once knelt to in your heart and offered up your love to. Revered and dwelt-on in your reveries. Or if not, some other man did.

She falls from higher than a man, from over the heads of men, whether they’re lovers or husbands or brothers. And whether she was good or she was evil, whatever evil is, she falls with a flash and a fiery trace, like a disintegrating star plunging into the water. A man just falls like a clod; clay back to the clay he came from. That is why judiciaries and law-enforcers so seldom kill women by law, no matter what their crime.

And when it is done by one man alone, personally and individually acting as his own sentencer and his own executioner, as you do now, think how much more affecting and impact-bearing it is.

That face you see before you that has just finished dying will come back palely haunting into every night’s sleep for the rest of your life, no matter how much she deserved it, no matter how tough your mind. You know it will, you know. That scene you saw before you that has just ended will come back meshed into every dream you ever dream again, so that you don’t just kill her once, you kill her a thousand and one times, and she never stays quite dead. And all the brandy and all the barbiturates can’t make it go away.

Those lips that pressed against yours like warm velvet and clung there in soft adhesion, look at them now, twisted into an ellipse, a crevice for a surprise that never finishes coming out. Those eyes that glittered with love and hate and laughter and hate and doubt and hate, and hate and hate and hate, they don’t hate now any more. Those arms that gestured so gracefully in the light, and wound around you so importunately in the dark, paid out on the floor now limp and curlycued, like lengths of wide ribbon that have slipped off their spools. The polish on the fingertips of the one lying face-down looking strangely like five little red seeds burst out of some pod and lying there scattered. A polish that claimed proudly to be long-lasting. I know; I used to see the bottle. This will prove it now: it will outlast her.

The hair your hand strayed through over and over, and found so soft and responsive each time; lying there fanned out and flotsam like a mess of seaweed washed up on the shore.

The body that once was the goal, and the striving, and the will-o’-the-wisp of the act of love...

All of this now devastated, distorted, and in death.

No, it isn’t good to see a woman...

I did a number of banal things that struck me strange, although I had never done this thing before and had no way of knowing whether they were banal or not, strangely out of key or not, or were to be expected to follow anything like that.