Death Sentence

23

In his fantasies he had dialogues. At first with Esther after she died; then with Carol after she’d been institutionalized. Now occasionally in daydreams he articulated his reasoning to Irene.

“Yesterday I killed another one.”

“Why?”

“He had a machete. He was attacking a man and a blind girl.”

“How many does that make now?”

“In Chicago?”

“Since you started in New York.”

“I don’t know. Twenty-five maybe. I don’t notch my guns.”

“Are you afraid?”

“I’d be weird if I wasn’t.”

The imagined dialogues followed a pattern but sometimes the wording changed; his fantasies refined and rehearsed fitfully.

“What scares you, Paul? What are you afraid of?”

“Death. Pain. The police. I don’t want them to find out who I am.”

“Is that all?”

“Them. The ones in the streets.”

“You’re afraid of them.”

“That’s why we’ve got to fight them.”

“Is it? Is that why you hunt them?”

“It started in blind anger. I wanted revenge. Retribution for what they’d done to my wife and my daughter.”

“But it changed?”

“There are still such things as good and evil.”

“You see it as a crusade?”

“I don’t know. I heard them talking about messianic delusions. It’s not that. I’m not trying to save the world. I’m only trying to show people that they can defend themselves. They shouldn’t have to live in terror every time they step out the door.”

“No, they shouldn’t. But why should you take it upon yourself?”

“Somebody’s got to do it.”

“That’s a cliché.”

“So?”

“It’s not an answer to the question.”

“I don’t know how to answer it. I just do it.”

“Put it another way. Killing them — how do you justify that, in terms of good and evil? How do you justify murder?”

“Is it murder? Self-defense, execution, protecting the rights of innocent people, wiping out a disease — you can call it a lot of things besides murder. Even war. It’s a kind of war.”

“You’ve killed unarmed people. Kids.”

“Once I shot a kid who was climbing out a window with a television set in his arms.”

“And you passed a death sentence on him. Was it a capital crime?”

“You can smell it. If anybody’d got in his way he’d have killed them without a second thought.”

“Is that your answer?”

“If my actions have prevented a single innocent person from being killed by these animals, then I’m justified. That’s my answer.”

“There’s something else, though.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s not just something you do out of a feeling of duty.”

“No. I do it because they scare me. I’m afraid of them and that makes me hate them. Hate — it’s an honest feeling.”

It went around in circles and he never found its ending.