Into the Night

That was the way she saw him, and nothing could convince her she was wrong.

All the possibilities she had listed had one thing in common, she couldn’t help noting. They were negative offenses. That is, offenses against himself, not against Starr. Any woman, any wife, would have done one of two things in such a case. Either stuck by him and tried to help him, or if she saw that was hopeless, simply washed her hands and walked out on him. But not turn around and want him killed. Even get ready to kill him herself. There wasn’t anything in any of those hypothetical malefactions that warranted that.

She found the list had vanished.

She crumpled the little leaf of paper and threw it away. She tugged the chain pull on the hooded desk lamp, and the pool of light in front of her eyes went out.

I can’t stand this uncertainty anymore, she thought, raking her fingers through her hair and dragging it down in front of her face. I’ll have to be a blind instrument of justice then, in every sense of the word, and do it still without knowing. Anything, anything, to get it over with and get rid of it!

The very next time we’re together, I’ll do it. I’ll have to do it then, or I may never do it at all.

Finally, the day had come. She knew it from the time she first opened her eyes early in the morning. On the one hand, there was no actual reason for it to be that day, and not the one that had just preceded it or the one that would immediately follow it; it was wholly arbitrary. Yet on the other hand, there was every reason. She had nerved herself to a certain pitch which she might not be able to hold longer than for just a few hours, and once lost or even partially relaxed, might never be able to regain. She needed this certain pitch, she could not do the thing without it. For she was not a professional killer nor yet a passionate one. She could kill neither in cold blood nor in hot. Both extremes were foreign to her nature. She could only kill as she was about to kill now: for an ideal, as an obligation, to fulfill a vow. As one lighted a taper at an altar: in expiation.

And only this once, never again.

He was a man. Of that there could be no doubt. He had been married to Starr, Starr had been his wife. He was the one she wanted killed, he and no other. And Starr-Madeline would be the goddess of the machine, who earned it out for her.

Let whatever he had done to her, whatever had made her want him killed, be buried with him, then, go down into the grave with the two of them and never be known. Maybe it was better that way. Who knew what the thing was? Why let it live on, dirtying the world? Why take it with her into some cell and nurse the morbid knowledge of it for the next twenty years or even her whole lifetime? Somehow in all her calculations — no, that wasn’t the word, she didn’t calculate in this — in all her willingness to accept punishment, to undergo penalty, she had never visualized herself being given a death sentence. Not that this would have deterred her. But it was always a lengthy prison term that she foresaw being meted out to her.

This was the day, then. It had come.

She hadn’t even left her bed yet. The slats of the Venetian blinds, or rather the interstices between them, drew thin pencil strokes of yellow on the wall opposite the window, and on the floor, and on the counterpane on her bed, and even partly up one of her bare arms. She even had the impression that one of these stripes of light must be lying flat across the bridge of her nose, because of a dazzle effect she got in both eyes. She thought it was charming; like being in a golden cage.

She got up and went over to the blinds and tugged the cord that controlled them. They went up supplely, with only a slight rustling sound, and the day became a full foursquare panel, not just streaked glimmers on a wall. It was surging with sunlight, and in it the city looked like something brand-new, that had just come into being. Every brick spotless, every paving block freshly laid. She leaned out, and a taxi with an orange roof polished as a mirror went scuttling by under her eyes, like some kind of an amiable, off-color beetle scampering for cover.

How strange, she thought, we’re both in this city together at this very moment, though at a distance. We’re both breathing, we’re both looking at things, even though we’re apart. Yet, by tonight, or by the early hours of the morning, he’ll be dead. Then he won’t be in this city anymore, just I will be, alone. Where will his breaths be then, where will they have gone? Where will the sights reflected on the irises of his eyes be then, where will they have gone?

I don’t know, for I didn’t order death, fashion it. I only know that he’ll be gone into it.