Into the Night

She opened the handbag at long last and took out the gun. He winced a little, very briefly, as you do when you know pain is coming. Necessary, benevolent pain. Then he turned more fully toward her, as if to give her a better surface at which to shoot, and he took a deep breath. It almost sounded like relief.

He didn’t speak another word from then on, for all the rest of the time she was there in the room.

Although the way it lay, on its side, it was pointing straight at him, she didn’t raise it in her hand.

He started to lean a little toward her. Not in an attempt to close the gap between them, in order to snatch at it or try to deflect it. For he kept his arms where they’d been — they were now slightly to the rear of him — and he leaned forward with his upper body only. He was like a man slowly preparing for a dive, a dive down into death. He even tilted his face upward a little, as if trying to help her, trying to cooperate. And his eyes were pleading, begging, she couldn’t mistake what they were saying to her. Asking for this gift that she alone could give him. The gift of death. The gift of clean, fast death, and then no more horror, no more fear, no more anything but nothing.

The tip of his tongue even crept out for an instant over at the far corner of his mouth, and touched the edge of his lips, as if in barely restrained anticipation.

Then he dropped the lids over his eyes and he just waited, breathing a little fast but breathing hopefully. Not cringing. Waiting bated for the accolade of deliverance. “You are free.” God’s greatest gift to man: death.

“But I’m not going to do it,” she said, with no more inflection than they’d used at the dinner table earlier. “I can’t. I see that now. This isn’t my affair. Why should I interfere? Who gave me that right and who gave me that obligation? I have my own happiness, my own peace, to think of. I’ve caused one death, taken one life, already. Why should I add a second to it? Will that make it easier for my conscience to bear the first? No. Why should I liquidate my debt to Starr, only to find myself with a new one on my hands, to you? And after you, who next? On and on and on, like the links of an endless chain. And if she could look at you now as I’m looking at you, perhaps she wouldn’t want you dead after all. For the greater punishment for you by far is not to be dead. I think for you, life is death. And death would be — just escape. So Starr gets her fulfillment after all.

“My hand won’t be the one to meddle with your destiny.”

His eyes had flown open, stunned, reproachful, long ago.

She’d gotten to her feet, and as she did so, the gun slid off her lap and into the inside corner of the sofa. She made no move to reclaim it. If she saw it at all, it had lost all meaning for her; her faculties were too absorbed in the metaphysical problem that engaged them both, inanimate objects around her had no bearing or existence.

He didn’t seem to notice it either. It was into her face that he kept looking, with his haunted, pleading eyes, so strained they were like white scars slashed across his face. Nothing else existed. To the end they were fixed on her, begging without a word.

She opened the door, and from it looked back at him. “Goodbye,” she said quietly. “May God have mercy on your soul. Your poor, poor soul.”

She closed the door, and shut the sight of him out.

She ran and ran and ran, through endless corridors of the night — as Starr had once run the unattainable distance between his bed and his front door — ran for miles and ran for hours, through countless turnings and this-ways and that-ways, and ups and downs, and meshing of cabs and braking of cabs, and the supporting arms of doormen and of elevator men around her, until at last the running stopped and she lay still, holding a palmful of little white pellets in one hand, a small half-empty bottle in the other.

When she opened her eyes in the morning after a tranquilizer-induced sleep, somehow she knew right away. He wasn’t in the world with her anymore. He was dead.

She was so sure, so certain, that she almost didn’t bother to ascertain. When she’d dressed, she went over to the window as she had yesterday and stood looking out. How long ago yesterday seemed.

She looked up at the sky and the clouds skimming by across it like little puff balls of white cotton, some of them unraveling with their own speed. Was it a better world without him? Was it a worse world? It was neither, she knew. It was an oblivious world, it didn’t even know he was gone. One living soul less, that was all.