Into the Night

At first there was music. Popular songs played on her little radio, the volume pitched low enough to keep the music from interfering with her thoughts. Then, as the sky darkened outside her window, she got up, crossed the room, turned on a lamp, then changed her mind and switched it off again. And, while she was at it, switched off the radio as well.

Better to sit in the dark, Madeline thought. Better to sit in the dark, and in the silence.

That way, though, you had only your own thoughts for company. And her own thoughts were bad company these days. They were a whirlpool, a vortex, sucking her deep down within herself, making her see parts of herself she didn’t wish to look at. It didn’t do to see too clearly into the darkness, didn’t do to listen too closely to those thoughts. That was why the whole world played the radio loud, and kept the lights burning. To keep the thoughts drowned out. To keep the darkness safely at bay.

But there came a time when you couldn’t do that anymore.

How long did she sit there, motionless, her mind hewing its own paths, finding its own way through a maze of ill-formed thoughts? She never knew. There was a watch on her wrist but she never looked at it.

Finally, without even thinking about it, she got to her feet and walked to the closet. Enough light came through the open window so that she could do this without stumbling. And she knew this little room well enough, had lived here long enough, so that she could move through it in pitch-darkness, with her eyes clenched shut.

She stepped upon a box to reach the closet’s highest shelf. There she reached into another box, groped until her hands found the soft bag with the hard object inside it. She drew it from the box, left the closet, returned to the chair where she had been sitting. And sat down again.

The velvet drawstring bag had once held a bottle of Canadian whiskey. Now it held something more immediately lethal.

A gun.

She loosened the drawstrings, removed the gun from the velvet bag. Its smell seemed to fill the room, a scent composed of the smell of metal and the smell of machine oil. She fancied, too, that she could detect the scent of gunpowder as well. Perhaps the gun had been fired since its last cleaning. More probably, though, the gunpowder smell had been supplied by her imagination. The gun had been her father’s, and as far as Madeline knew, he had never fired it.

He hadn’t needed to. He had killed himself slowly, and in a more socially acceptable, less scandalous way.

With the whiskey. Expensive Canadian whiskey at first, of the sort the velvet sack had once held. Then, toward the end, with cheap rye whiskey and cheaper California wine. Until one night, they told her, he had a seizure and died on the street.

He’d left the clothes he was wearing, and another few changes of clothing barely worth giving to the Salvation Army. He’d left a manila envelope of meaningless old letters and postcards and newspaper clippings; she’d given up trying to make sense of them and dropped them down the incinerator long ago. And he’d left this gun, this revolver, as his sole real legacy to his sole daughter.

And here it was now, the metal cold in her hand, the smell of it oppressive in the little furnished room.

What a legacy! What a parting gift!

In case you ever want to kill someone, Madeline.

Or in case you ever want to kill yourself.

How strange that he’d kept it all those years while he treated himself to a slower, quieter death. You’d think, she thought, that he’d either have gotten rid of the gun or used it. But it had been in his room when he died, and, miracle of miracles, the cops who searched his room had delivered it to her instead of appropriating it for their own purposes. And so it was in her hands now, ready for her to do with it as she wished.

Her hands couldn’t leave the thing alone. She passed it from hand to hand, curled her index finger around the trigger, caressed the hammer with her thumb. Holding the weapon at arm’s length, she sighted at various objects across the room, aiming at the little radio, the lamp, the darkness at the far corner of the room. She took aim, felt the trigger trembling under her index finger like a living thing, but never gave the trigger that final squeeze that would transform fantasy into reality.

Why keep the thing? Why have it around the room where she lived?

Because it was all she had left of him, she thought, but decided that wasn’t it. She had tossed his papers down the incinerator, had given his clothes away, without a second thought. She had kept the gun because—

Because she must have known she’d have a use for it.

Her blood ran cold at the thought. Was that it? Was her father’s last gift to her to be the means of ending her own life?

Put it away, she told herself. Put it back in the sack, and in the morning, when night thoughts have been banished by sunlight, take it out and get rid of it. Drop it in a trash can or down a sewer. Get rid of it before it got rid of you.

Did it even work? Was it even loaded? For all she knew it was empty of bullets, its firing mechanism long since rusted shut, the whole thing useful only as a paperweight. But she didn’t think so. It seemed in her hands to give off a murderous energy, as if the capacity to destroy, to kill, existed in it as a palpable living entity.

She put the barrel in her mouth, tasted metal on her tongue.

Felt the trembling of the trigger.

She took the gun from her mouth and held it to her temple. She put the barrel into her ear, then held it to her throat so that it touched against a pulse point. Just squeeze the trigger, she thought, and in an instant there would be no pulse, no thoughts in the mind, nothing, nothing at all.

But why?

That, she thought, was the strangest part, because the question was unanswerable. Why kill herself? Because her life was empty, she thought. Because there was no reason not to kill herself. But was that ever a reason to do anything? By the same token, she could argue that she ought to go on living, if only because there was no reason not to go on living.

Reasons.

Did people ever have reasons for the things they did? Did they even need them? Life, after all, was not a problem in logic. You didn’t get a prize for figuring it all out, and that was just as well, because no one ever figured it out. Whether or not there was a reason to go on living, some people went on living. Whether or not there was a reason to kill oneself, some people killed themselves.

Turn on a light, she thought savagely. Play some music. Sing along with the radio, sing at the top of your lungs if you want to. But get out of this mood and get through the night, and first thing in the morning you’ll get rid of the gun.

No.

Somehow she could not put the gun back in the velvet bag. Thoughts flickered through her mind. Something she’d heard once, a rule of drama: If you showed a gun in the first act of a play, you had to make sure it was fired before the curtain at the end of the third act. And weren’t there tribesmen somewhere who, having drawn their daggers, would not return them to their sheaths until they had drawn blood? In the absence of an enemy, they would nick their own thumbs rather than sheathe their weapons unblooded. Perhaps this was superstition, or perhaps it was to prevent them from brandishing their weapons too casually.

Again she found herself holding the gun to her temple.

Her life had no purpose.

It was hard to say how it had come to this. Perhaps her life had never had purpose. She had drifted through it, living in one place or another, working at one thing or another, without realizing the extent to which she was drifting. She had lived without a purpose, blissfully ignorant of the need for a purpose, and now she found herself confronted by the purposelessness of her existence and felt devastated by the confrontation.

You could live a short life or a long one. You could nip a purposeless life in the bud or let it spin itself out for seventy or eighty or a hundred years. Either way you died, and once you were dead it was as if you had never lived.

You were gone and that was the end of it.

Then why hurry it?

Or: then why delay it?

Play the radio, she told herself. Turn on some lights.

Instead, once more she brought the gun to her temple. Once more her thumb drew back the hammer. Once more her finger tightened on the trigger.

Did she decide to squeeze the trigger? Are these things decided? Her finger tightened on the trigger as it had done before, only this time it went on tightening, and she squeezed the trigger.

The hammer descended on an empty chamber.

Relief flooded through her, relief that expanded to fill her own body. She had been spared, she had been saved, and her life of a sudden felt infinitely precious. Even as she trembled at the narrowness of her escape, at the same time she thrilled to the excitement of being alive. A moment ago life had held no excitement, and now, suddenly, the mere fact that she was alive was exciting in and of itself.

She had survived. She had played out her hand, risking everything, and she had won.

She sprang to her feet. Tomorrow the old gun would go where it belonged — in the trash, down the sewer, wherever it could do no harm. She would not need it again. She had kept it, she knew now, for this very purpose — to stand on the very brink of death and be given her life back. She had taken a horrible chance, but it was a risk she need never run again.

She danced across the room, switched on the lamp, filled the room with its cheering glow. She turned on the little radio, let the room fill up with music. She moved gaily to the music, her feet as light now as her heart had been heavy mere moments ago.

And, dancing, she realized with a start that she was still holding the gun.

She stopped, stared at the thing in her hand. Very nearly the instrument of her destruction, it had instead been the means of her deliverance, and her feelings for the object were impossible to sort out. One thing, though, was quite certain. She didn’t want to carry it around with her now.

She found the velvet bag, tucked the gun into it, drew the drawstrings tight. And then, dancing again, caught up in the music and in her own joy in life, she slapped the gun down on a table. Perhaps she meant merely to set it down. Perhaps the rhythm of the music and the joy of her own life urge made her slam the gun down so dramatically.

The gun discharged upon impact.

The noise of the shot was enormous in the little room. She caught her breath at it, and her heart clutched in her chest. Even as the sound of the gunshot was dying out around her, she moved quickly and without thought to switch off the radio, so that the silence which followed the shot could be complete.

Where had the bullet gone?

She moved, frantically, to touch her hands to her own body, as if she could have been shot without realizing it. What irony, to fail in an attempt at suicide, then to shoot oneself by accident just minutes later. But the bullet had not struck her.

Yet there had been a bullet. The room reeked of cordite, and the velvet bag showed a black-edged hole where the bullet had torn its way out.

She looked for a bullet hole in the walls, for damage to anything within the room. She saw nothing.

Then, as if magnetically, her eyes were drawn to the open window.

She was gazing at the window when she heard someone moaning outside.

A woman, alone, sprawled on the pavement. A woman, young, moaning, sobbing, her head cradled now in Madeline’s lap.

A woman, shot in the chest on the sidewalk across the street from Madeline’s rooming house. Shot in the chest, bleeding, the blood streaming from the wound. Eyes trying to focus, a mouth trying to form words.

Around them, a crowd was forming. People cried out questions, supplied answers.

Who was she?

Why, she lived here in the neighborhood.

Who shot her?

Why, there had been a shot fired from a passing car. Some lunatic, some thrill killer, driving through a quiet neighborhood, rolling down his window and firing at random.

My God, here? In this neighborhood?

Hell, it could happen anywhere. All it takes is one madman with a gun and a grudge. That’s all it takes and it can happen anywhere, and to anyone. You get some madman shooting from a window, some lunatic killing little kids, some maniac stabbing hitchhikers. Or someone like this, firing at random from a moving auto.

The voices were background music to Madeline. She barely heard them because they didn’t know anything. There had been no shot from a passing car, although death had been as random, as capricious, in selecting this young woman.

Her gun, her father’s gun. The gun had spared Madeline’s life and taken this life instead. It was true — you couldn’t return your weapon unblooded to its sheath. The gun you showed onstage had to be fired before the curtain fell.

Now the curtain had fallen, and a comedy had turned to a tragedy.

There was a siren, a police car on its way. But she barely heard it. She was looking down into the woman’s eyes, and as she sought to see into them she saw the very life go out of them. The girl shuddered once in her arms and was still.

The lamp was on, and the radio. Both stayed on all night as she sat in her room, waiting for them to come for her. It was only a matter of time, she thought, before the police came to her room and knocked on her door. When that happened, she would admit them and tell them what had happened. How she had tried to kill herself. How she had been spared, and how a woman across the street had been chosen by some unseen hand to die in her place.

How, more prosaically, she had acted thoughtlessly with a gun, and how a bullet had found its way through an open ground-floor window and into living flesh.

And then what would happen to her?

She didn’t know. What she had done had not been murder in the technical sense of the word. It had, to be sure, been an accident. But this did not mean the law would not find her at fault. It had been a criminal accident, and there would certainly be some penalty she would have to pay for it. And that was fitting enough. She had deprived another woman of her life. Whatever penalty the law exacted would be no more than fair.

And so she waited for them to come. She had slipped away from the scene outside moments after the woman’s life had slipped away. Gently she’d laid the woman’s head on the pavement. The crowd had opened up for her as she stepped through it, closing again around the woman’s body without taking note of Madeline. But someone surely had noticed her, and someone would say something to a policeman, and they would come to her door, if only to seek her testimony as a witness. Perhaps she had been there when the woman was shot. Perhaps she had seen the killer, or noted the license number of the car. Certainly she ought to be questioned, so that they might determine what she did or did not know.

The radio played on. Outside, the police cars came and went, the crowd dispersed. The gun, still wrapped in its velvet bag, remained on the table where she had flung it. From where she sat, she could see the ugly hole marked with powder burns where the bullet had exited.

If she had known the police were not to come, perhaps she might have turned the gun again on herself. But she fully expected their visit and was willing to leave the matter of her retribution up to them. Even when the sky lightened with dawn, she waited for them to appear.

But they did not appear.

For two days she waited. She did not leave the room. She did not eat or drink. It was impossible to say if she slept. She stayed in her chair, and there were times when her eyes were open and times when they were shut.

After two days, she knew the police were not going to come.

Starr Bartlett.

The dead woman. A name that breathed life, romance, even glamour. Starr Bartlett.

Madeline had listened for the name on the radio, expecting it from the tongue of every news announcer, but each report began and ended and the name didn’t come. Just as the police didn’t come. She learned no more from the newspapers she bought after she finally left her room. A murder in a different section of the city, a better-off section, would have made headlines, but here? In Madeline’s little corner of the city, in Starr Bartlett’s, death was not news. A gunshot was not news. It was commonplace, familiar. Dog bites man.

Madeline asked at the newsstand, at the grocer’s, at the Greek luncheonette that dished up eggs and toast at all hours. Finally she asked the gray-haired woman reading the horoscopes in a chair outside the self-serve laundromat, and the woman, speaking hoarsely around the remnants of a cigarette she’d smoked nearly down to the filter, said yes, she’d known the dead woman, to say hello to while they waited for their wash-and-wear to spin dry.

Starr Bartlett had lived in a rooming house just two blocks from Madeline’s own. She was young, in her twenties, and unmarried. She lived alone. And she had been struck down by a bullet which people said had been fired from a passing automobile. The woman’s own son was on the force, and he’d told her the police were convinced that the murder was the work of a random killer, possibly committed in imitation of a series of killings which had taken place two months previously in a large city a thousand miles away, and which had had enough press coverage to prompt a deranged person to emerge as a copycat killer.

If he struck again, the woman’s son told her with a comforting pat on the arm, they would surely get him.

The implication being that this particular case had reached a dead end, and that, if there were no more similar killings, the murderer would escape uncaught.

Well, there would be no more killings, not with that gun. Madeline placed it, velvet bag and all, inside a brown paper bag, and tucked the package into her purse. She took a long walk, and in its course she pushed the wrapped-up gun down a storm drain. It would most likely never be found; if it were, it would never be connected to her.

So she had gotten away with murder.

She thought about that a day or two later as she sat at the Greek’s lunch counter sipping a cup of coffee. She had bought a paper and could search through it for coverage of the death of Starr Bartlett, but without even opening the paper she knew there was nothing. And unless she confessed, she thought, there would be nothing. Starr was dead and her death had become part of the great body of unsolved crimes in the city’s files. There would be no stories because there was nothing to be said.

She saw those eyes, staring up at her. And the light going out of them, as the life went out of their owner.

“You all right, miss?”

She looked up. The counterman’s face was a mask of concern.

“The look on your face,” he said. “Like you were gonna faint, or something.”

“No,” she assured him. “No, I’m all right.”

Should she confess?

She thought about it. If the police had come, she would have confessed in a minute. But when they failed to appear it was as if she was being told that her confession was not required or even desired.

But what did that mean? Did she go scot-free?

That seemed inappropriate. Perhaps nothing would be gained by her confession, but what would be gained by her escaping punishment altogether? Wasn’t she in debt? Didn’t she owe something?

To whom? To the police? To Society with a capital S?

No.

To Starr.

The thought, once it came to her, seemed unmistakably obvious. She, Madeline, had tried to kill herself. She had been unable to do so. She had killed Starr instead.

Starr had died for her.

Therefore, she would live for Starr.

But how?

Starr, she thought, I wanted to die because my life had no purpose. Now I can find a purpose in living for you, and you can go on living through me. But for God’s sake, who are you? What kind of life did you have, Starr? Starr, I don’t know you at all!

“I suppose I should rent her room,” the landlady said. “I guess I will, soon as I get around to it. I been sort of waiting for someone to come for her things, but I guess that’s not going to happen. I haven’t had the heart to pack up her things and send them. Long as her room’s the way she left it, it’s as if she could come back to it anytime. Soon as I pack up her stuff and rent the room out to somebody else, well, it makes her death that much more real for me, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” Madeline said.

“I suppose I’m being silly,” the woman said. “If you want to see the room, I guess that’s all right. I don’t see who it would hurt. The police have been through it, looking for reasons why someone would kill her. Then I guess they decided no one had a reason to kill her, that she just got in the way of the bullet.”

That was truer than anybody realized, Madeline thought.

“Right this way, then,” the woman said.

A rooming house not unlike her own. The same cooking smells in the hallway, the kind of smells you got when cooking consisted mostly of heating up canned goods on hot plates. Creaking stairs. Walls that needed painting.

“You just can’t keep up with an old building like this,” the woman said defensively, although Madeline had said nothing. “One thing needs doing after another. You can’t keep up with it, you know. Or else you’d have to raise the rents, and people can’t pay but so much. I keep it clean, though, and I only rent to decent people.”

They were at Starr’s door. The woman knocked on it, then caught herself.

“I don’t know why I’m knocking,” she said. “Force of habit, I shouldn’t wonder. I respect people’s privacy, it’s the way I was brought up.”

She produced a key, turned it in the lock, opened the door. The room was smaller than Madeline’s, but similarly finished. The closet door was open, showing clothing on the hooks and hangers. The bed was made, and there was some clothing piled on it.

“You see what I mean,” the landlady said. “It’s like the room was waiting for her to come back to it.”

“Yes,” Madeline breathed.

“It’s hard to take in what happened to her. Shot down that way.”

“Yes.”

“As young as she was.”

“It’s tough to die when you’re young,” Madeline said. “Like a stray dog.”

“That’s just it,” the woman said. “She deserved better of life She didn’t deserve to die like a dog in the street, and that’s exactly how she did die. And for what purpose? For what purpose?”

Madeline didn’t say anything. For a long moment the two women stood there. Then the older woman cleared her throat, as if she were about to say something, and Madeline said, “Tell me about her.”

“What is there to tell? She lived here. Not for very long, but I felt that I knew her better than I did.”

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t know exactly. We didn’t talk much. She mostly kept to herself. I told all this to the police.” She looked at Madeline. “Why do you have to know all this?”

“Just a sense I have. That she and I were alike. Young women, single, living alone in rooming houses in this neighborhood. It could as easily have been me out there, out for a walk, struck down by a stray bullet.”

“You feel a kinship with her,” the woman said.

“I guess that’s it. I feel that... that our lives are bound up in one another, even though we never met and I never knew her. I feel as though I owe her something.”

“What could you possibly owe her?”

A life, she thought. Starr gave her life for me. She did it unwittingly, she didn’t choose to do it, but what difference does that make? She died for me, and I have to live for her.

But of course she couldn’t say that to the woman.

“Understanding,” she said thoughtfully. “I owe her understanding.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Maybe I don’t know what I mean either. But I feel as though our lives touched one another, and I want to get to know that woman whose life touched mine.”

The woman said nothing for a long moment. Madeline moved through the room, went to the window, looked out. She turned, put a hand on the bed as if to test the springs.

The woman said, “There was no one in her life.”

“You mean she lived alone?”

“I mean more than that. I mean she was alone with herself, completely alone. She wouldn’t let people get near her. I liked her, I felt good seeing her in the hallway or on the stairs, I’d always pass the time of day with her, but I never got anywhere near her. I don’t think anybody did. I don’t suppose anybody could.”

“I see.”

“I think she was sorrowful,” the woman said. “She didn’t broadcast her sorrows but I think it was there all the same. I think something or somebody caused her deep pain, and I don’t think she ever got over that pain.”

“Maybe she would have,” Madeline said. “If she’d had a longer life.”

“Maybe,” the woman said. And then, after a moment, “But you know, there are some kinds of pain you never get over.”

“Yes,” Madeline said. “I know.”

“Well,” the woman said. “If there’s nothing else, I have things I ought to be doing. A house like this, there’s always something that needs doing.”

“Could I—”

“What?”

“I’d like to stay here.”

The woman stared at her. “You want to rent her room? You want to live where she lived?”

It hadn’t occurred to her, but now she allowed herself to entertain the thought. Could she move right into Starr’s life that way?

The thought was not without a certain appeal, but it didn’t really make sense. She didn’t want to become Starr Bartlett, which was anyway impossible on the face of it. No, she wanted not to live as Starr but to live for her. To perform some service for Starr that the dead woman could not perform for herself.

But what service? What could that be, and how could she ever discover it?

“No,” she said. “No, I don’t want to rent the room. I think you should rent it to somebody, though. Clear it out and rent it. The way it is now, it’s a tomb for an absent corpse.”

“Yes,” the woman said. “Yes, you’re right.”

“But in the meantime, I’d like to spend a little time here,” she went on. “I’d just like to be alone here.”

“Alone?”

“Well, virtually alone. Alone with Starr.”

“You’ve had your sorrows too,” the woman said pointedly. “Same as she did.”

“Maybe.”

“I guess it’d be all right for you to spend a little time here,” the woman said. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt anything. Except—”

“Except what?”

“I don’t like to say it.”

Madeline waited.

“Sometimes a person’ll decide to... do away with theirselves. And rather than do it where they live, they’ll take a room just for that purpose. That happened here once. A man came, no luggage, said it was being shipped, said he’d pay a week’s rent in advance, and that very first night he took pills and died in his sleep.” The woman avoided Madeline’s eyes. “And you,” she said, “wanting to see a dead woman’s room, and wanting to be alone in it. I don’t think you’d be wanting to do that, and I didn’t want to say anything, but I was the one walked in on that man and discovered his body there. One look and I knew he wasn’t sleeping. He didn’t look anything like somebody who was sleeping. His face was so blue it was near to purple.”

“How awful for you.”

“They said he was sick with something that would have killed him before long. He wanted an easy death, and he came here to spare his loved ones the horror of finding him. But he evidently thought it was all right for a total stranger to have that same horror.”

“I’m not going to kill myself,” Madeline said gently.

“I know you’re not. I shouldn’t have said anything, but I... had to.”

“I understand.”

“You stay here as long as you like,” the woman said. “I don’t know what good it could do you, but it won’t do anybody any harm, will it? Spend all the time you want. I left her room as she left it. I tidied up just a little. The police were through her things and they don’t always take the time to be neat. There were some things they left on the floor that I straightened up and put on the bed there.”

“I see.”

“As if she wouldn’t want her things left messy. As if she cares now what her room looks like. But she was neat, you know. She kept to herself and she kept her things neat. So it only seems right to keep them neat now.”

“Yes.”

“I think you’re right, what you said before. Soon as I have the strength for it I’ll pack up her things. Instead of waiting for somebody to come for them, I’ll just ship them back home to her mother. And I’ll rent this room out.”

Madeline nodded.

“But for now,” the woman said, “spend what time you want here. Maybe her spirit’s here, or a trace of it. Maybe you can have some kind of contact with her. There’s stranger things than that happening every day of the year.”

Madeline stood there motionless for a long time after, just where she’d left her. Listening to the echoing, inside her heart, of something that she’d said just now. Heavy and hollow, cold and lonely, sad and blue.

Its tough to die when you’re young. Like a stray dog.

I must remember, and remember, and remember that, by the hour, she told herself. By the hour and by the day and by the week; yes, even by the year, if it should become necessary. Until I have at least partly undone this terrible thing that I’ve done to her. This thing that, try as I will, can never again be wholly undone.

After a while she took off her clothes, as Starr would have, here, in this, her room. She went over and selected a night robe from the things the landlady had left on the bed. Maybe it was the very one Starr had worn for her last sleep, on her last night on earth. But then she saw that it couldn’t very well be for it was freshly laundered and even mended a little in one place where it had frayed — unless the landlady had done that after her death (and why should she?).

She put it on and went and stood before the glass in it.

“Starr,” she breathed, to the figure she saw in it. “Starr. I can see you now. And that’s a form of living on.”

She put out the light, moved over a chair, and sat down by the window, looking out. It was evening in the city, and evening in the sky. Below there were a thousand stars, above there were just as many. But the ones below were like human lives, just there for a night and then gone. The ones above were like human hopes and dreams, they glowed on there forever. And if one life failed and went out, then another came along and took up the hope, the dream, glowing there immutably above, glowing there forever.

As I am doing now, she thought. As I am doing now.

And peering at them, until they seemed to be reflected in the strained width, the glistening anxiety, of her eyes, she breathed softly, supplicatingly to them: You must have seen her sitting at this same window before me. You must have heard the heartbeats of her hopes and aspirations, clearly in the stillness of the night. Do you know what they were? Do you?

You open a valise — and a life comes back into view. A life that was already done with, locked up and put away. And as you spread it all about you in the room, on the bed, on the seats of chairs, wherever there is room, somehow you feel a little frightened at what you are doing, feel you have no right to do this. It’s like trying to turn back the laws of nature and of God. Force a minor, two-by-four resurrection on something that was already at rest. You’d better watch out, you keep telling yourself; you’d better be careful.

A photograph of a man, torn in half, the diagonal edge ragged, exposing the grain of the paper beneath the silver coating. His face showing in close-up, but only from one cheek down. Who was he? What was he to her? Where was he now?

Smiling at her. Smiling at the lens that had taken him, but it must have been she behind that lens that day, for it was a special sort of smile that you don’t give just to the lens of a camera. Warmer than that, closer than that; saying, You’re over there and I’m over here. But you were over here with me a moment ago, and you’ll be back again a moment from now. We won’t be apart any longer than that; we weren’t meant to be; we won’t let ourselves be.

“To my darling Starr, Vick.”

Who are you, Vick?

Don’t you even miss her? Don’t you even know she’s gone? The moment’s over, don’t you even wonder why she doesn’t come across there, back to where you are?

Keep on smiling, Vick. Keep on smiling forever that way. You’re smiling at empty space now, and you don’t know it. You have no eyes any longer and cannot see. She’s gone from behind the lens of the camera. You remain, but she is gone. Gone and she’ll never come back. Would you keep on smiling if you knew that?

In some quiet place — it looked as if it had been taken in some quiet place — she could almost hear the girl’s clear silvery voice ring out again.

“Stand still now, Vick. Move back a little. No, just a little; that’s enough. Now smile for me. That’s it.”

Smile forever, Vick. As long as the glossy paper lasts.

You can stop smiling now, Vick, she’s not there anymore. You’re smiling at vacant space, Vick. There’s a hole in the world, behind the camera where she was.

She propped the partial photo up and sat looking at it.

The sun was going down outside and the room was getting dark.

A patch of light lingered to the end, right there where she had the photo. Playing it up, making it stand out; making the image on it seem luminous.

Tell me, Vick, she pleaded. Tell me while you still can.

The light contracted, swirled to a closing pinpoint, went out; like an iris-out on a motion-picture screen.

The photo was dark now, blended into the surrounding darkness of the room.