Nobody Knew They Were There

Friday, November 1

Weglowski has not taken the truck tonight, for fear it will be recognized. Instead, he is driving a nondescript, faded blue, 1968 Chevrolet sedan, the trunk of which is loaded with dynamite, blasting caps, coils of wire, friction tape, and tools. I notice that he drives with extreme caution, but I make no comment. He seems dour and uncommunicative, a trifle tense. When at last I ask him whether he is worried about setting the explosives, he answers that he is worried only about going to jail. I tell him, with what I consider to be a humorous edge, that I quite share his concern. He acknowledges my comment with a brief dismissive nod.

We park the car at the overlook, and hastily unload the trunk. He has packed the dynamite and blasting caps into two knapsacks, and we quickly strap these to our backs. There are several large coils of wire, and we loop these over our arms and shoulders. Weglowski shoves the roll of black tape into the pocket of his mackinaw and then straps on his tool belt. We cannot risk being seen on the highway this way, and so we take to the woods at once, stepping into knee-deep snow, and begin the half-mile trek back to the bridge.

I am worried about leaving footprints.

Weglowski tells me, in impeccable English and with a dryness indicating he caught my earlier jibe, that he quite shares my concern.

There is no moon. The land slopes away before us, falling off toward the gap. A rabbit’s tracks hemstitch the snow, circle a tree, vanish. I am no longer fearful of rattlesnakes (it is my city belief that you do not find rattlesnakes in the snow), but now I am beginning to worry about wildcats or wolves or worse. I stay very close to Weglowski, who plows through the snow grunting and puffing, now and then muttering what I assume to be Polish swear words. Above us, on the highway, the headlights of an occasional automobile pierce the darkness, the clinking of tire chains merges with the brittle night The bridge is just ahead.

We hold a hurried consultation, our breaths billowing like comic strip balloons. Weglowski wants to know where I will do it, and at first I do not understand him.

“From where?” he whispers.

“What do you mean?”

“From where you blast?”

“Oh. I don’t know. Where do you think? I mean, where will it be safest for me?”

He looks around. The sloping ravine is barren of cover save for low outcroppings of rock and underbrush. There is, however, near the eastern end of the bridge, a huge boulder. Weglowski suggests that if I station myself on or behind that boulder, I will be safe from the blast and have a clear view of the bridge. I agree with him. We half slide, half run down the southern slope of the gap, and then begin climbing up to the boulder. It is not an easy climb. The northern side of the ravine is steep, and the snow has been blown off, leaving a treacherous escarpment of ice and rock. When we finally reach the boulder, my heart is pounding furiously, and I am covered with a cold sweat. But the boulder itself is a perfect observation platform, large enough for a man to lie prone on its flat top, commanding an unobstructed view of the bridge and its western approach.

As Weglowski starts across the tracks to the far end of the trestle, the knapsack full of dynamite on his back,

I am certain he will lose his footing and tumble into the ravine below, setting off a blast that will demolish both himself and the scheme. But he is a sure-footed old goat, and I watch him as he nimbly picks his way over the ties until he is consumed by darkness and I can no longer see him.

I stretch out on the boulder, and peer into the blackness.

The night is still. It is fiercely cold, but there is no wind. From the other end of the bridge, I hear sounds I think I can identify, the small mechanical click of a pair of pliers, the rasp of tape being tom. On the highway, in the distance, there is the jangle of tire chains, the hum of an approaching automobile. Headlights flash around the bend in the road, illuminate the highway guard rail, and pass on. The night is still again. I can hear my watch ticking in the darkness. The time is nine-thirty. Professor Epstein, wearing the costume we decided upon this morning, will have picked up Sara at her apartment a half hour ago. The masquerade party at Hester’s house will be in full swing by now. If all goes well…

Weglowski is coming back toward the center of the bridge, paying out wire behind him. He reaches the apogee of the arch, climbs under the tracks, and disappears from sight. I can hear the clicking of pliers again, the tearing of tape. He seems to be taking longer at the middle of the span that he did at the far end, and I assume it is because his hold is more tenuous there, suspended as he is above the deepest part of the gorge, and clinging to the girders for support. I look at the luminous dial of my watch. Thirty-five minutes have gone by since he left me here on the boulder, and twenty of those minutes have been spent at the keystone point. I wonder if he is having difficulty. There is the sound of another automobile in the distance, the metallic rattle of tire chains. I crane my neck for a view of the approaching car. As it rumbles past, I see the distinctive red dome light on its roof. The car does not stop, it does not even slacken its speed. But I keep watching until it disappears, and then I continue staring in to the darkness, listening, wondering if it will stop at the overlook where the blue Chevrolet is parked.

“Weglowski!” I whisper.

He does not answer.

“Weglowski!”

“What?” he whispers back.

“Hurry! That was the police!”

“What?”

“The police, the police!”

“What? What?”

I hear him scrambling from beneath the arch and onto the tracks above.

“They’re gone now,” I whisper, “but for God’s sake, hurry!”

There is silence for a moment Then Weglowski says, “Jackass,” and goes back to work.

In a little while, he comes into view again, paying his wire out behind him toward my end of the bridge. He climbs onto the boulder, takes the second knapsack of dynamite without saying a word to me, and then goes down to where the end of the arch is embedded in concrete below. He is at work for perhaps an additional fifteen minutes. When he climbs up to the boulder again, he is holding two strands of wire in his hands.

“These you connect to the box tomorrow morning,” he tells me.

In the basement of his house, I apologize for having alarmed him, explaining that I was frightened all along that he might tumble into the ravine and blow himself up. He is still miffed, and he tells me in his broken English that the whole point of Nobel’s invention was to combine nitroglycerin (“Volatile, extremely volatile,” Epstein has said) with various inert porous substances in order to reduce its sensitivity to shock and avoid accidental explosion. In other words, he could have fallen off that bridge with the knapsack full of dynamite on his back and suffered nothing more serious than a broken leg, do I understand?

I do not understand completely, but I would never admit it to him now. Besides, I am anxious to get on with this. It is twenty minutes to eleven, and I must get to Hester’s house before midnight I nod solemnly.

‘That’s why the box,” he says.

“The box,” I repeat.

“For spark,” he says, “for explode,” and then goes on to explain what he has done. The bridge is now wired with three fifty-pound charges of dynamite, one at each end and one in the middle. He has used five-pound sticks, tied together and then taped to the girders. At each end, he has placed his charge behind the footing even though he would have preferred setting the dynamite into a hole drilled in the concrete. He is certain he can blow out the footings this way, but he admits the other way would have been better. It is a matter of time and equipment, however; drilling into concrete is not a simple matter. He tells me again that he is sure the footings can be blown out this way, but I am beginning to think he doth protest, and he is making me slightly nervous. He speculates that the fifty-pound charge in the center of the span might be enough to knock down the bridge unassisted by the other two charges — but again he sounds dubious, and I cannot dismiss the feeling that he is not too certain about any of this.

He has wired the blasting caps in series, using a number-20 wire to connect the first charge to the second to the third, and then running his lead wires from the first charge and the third back to the boulder, where I am to connect them to the detonator tomorrow morning. He shows me the detonator now. He refers to it as “the box,” which is exactly what it is, a wooden box perhaps a foot high and six inches square. A metal plate is fastened to the box, giving the manufacturer’s name, and the serial number, and the model number, and an official title as well: blasting machine. I find that comical. It is a blasting machine; it looks exactly like all the blasting machines I have ever seen in movies from the time I was six years old, with a metal plunger sticking up out of its middle, and with two big brass screws and wing nuts around and under which I am to secure the lead wires tomorrow morning. Then all I have to do is push the plunger down (the last two inches are the only ones that count, Weglowski explains) and because the charges are wired in series, the electric current will hit the three blasting caps buried in dynamite sticks at precisely the same moment, and the footings and keystone will go together, the bridge will tumble into the ravine carrying the train with it.

It is all very simple.

All I have to do is do it.

There is a leather carrying handle on the box, but Weglowski does not think (and again here, I detect a dry sense of humor) I should walk through the hotel lobby carrying a blasting machine on a strap. He puts it into a brown paper bag instead. I am carrying the future of the nation in a brown paper bag.

Outside the hotel, Weglowski asks, “When I get my money?”

“I have nothing to do with the money arrangements,” I answer.

“I want before the train.”

“Of course.”

“You tell them. Tell them Weglowski wants his money early tomorrow, before the train. Otherwise, maybe no explosion.”

“What does that mean?”

“You tell them,” he says.

It is eleven-thirty when the taxi drops me off at Hester’s house.

I have deposited the blasting machine in my room, and quickly changed into my brown suit, entering and leaving the hotel through the side entrance as I did earlier tonight when meeting Weglowski. The brown suit is hardly inspired. But it is the only one I have with me, and Epstein possesses one as well, and he is at this moment wearing it under his costume and waiting for me in Hester’s garage (I hope). The costume, such as it is, still bothers me. A man has a distinctive gait, a personal way of holding himself, clearly recognizable unless he is disguised from head to toe. A gorilla suit would have been perfect, a shambling dancing bear, something of the sort, but try to find such stuff in a small university town. We have done the best we might have under the circumstances, but our solution still troubles me, still seems as makeshift as our entire endeavor (which may be significant, who knows?).

I hear party noises as I walk around to the side of the house, music, laughter, the same party noises that are probably being heard all over America on this Friday night following Halloween, but here they are sham, here they have been created only for cover, an assassin’s alibi. I barely avoid discovery by a costumed couple necking in the shadows near the chimney wall on the western end of the house. The garage door is open. There is no light. I enter, and wonder if I dare whisper Epstein’s name.

A hand touches my shoulder.

I come close to screaming.

He materializes in the darkness before me. We stand toe to toe, neither of us speaking. His eyes are already accustomed to the gloom, but it is some time before mine adjust and before I can see him however dimly. He is, to be truthful, quite unrecognizable. He is wearing over the brown suit a raccoon coat borrowed from one of the medical students in Sara’s building. Around his throat, he has wrapped the long blue-and-white striped muffler Hester wore on her unannounced visit to my hotel room Monday night. He is also wearing blue mittens, and a porkpie hat, and he is carrying in his left hand a W.M.U. pennant on a stick. A button pinned to the collar of the raccoon coat reads “Class of ’29,” and the rubber mask he has pulled over his head is apple-cheeked and bulbous-nosed, grinning, the face of an old fart back for the big game with the school’s traditional enemy. We shopped three five-and-dimes before finding that mask. I wonder now if my mustache will cause me to suffocate inside it I also wonder whether anyone at the party will notice that the old grad’s shoes have miraculously changed from the brown Oxfords Epstein is wearing to the brown loafers I am wearing.

“What’s your shoe size?” I whisper.

“What?”

“Your shoe. The size.”

“8½ B. Why?”

“Forget it,” I whisper.

Epstein begins taking clothes off, and I begin putting them on. “Time did not mention the exact length of the train,” he whispers. “But it did say there would be a locomotive and four cars.”

“Uh-huh.” I have already put on the raccoon coat, and am now wrapping Hester’s muffler around my throat It smells faintly of Muguet du Bois.

“It’s my educated guess,” Epstein whispers, “that if you detonated your blast when the second car is in the middle of the bridge, you’ll get the whole train with plenty of yardage to spare. Do you agree?”

“Yes, I guess so.” I put on the mittens. They are sticky and hot.

“Did you wire the bridge?”

“Yes.”

He hands me the rubber mask, and I pull it on over my head. It is even stickier and hotter than the mittens, and it reeks of Epstein’s aftershave lotion.

“Good luck,” he whispers. “Sara’s waiting for you.”

“Did you talk to anyone?” I ask.

“What?”

“Your voice, your voice.”

“I slurred my words. Like a drunk. Returning graduates usually…

“Yes, I understand.”

“Good luck,” he says again.

I move out of the garage and walk swiftly to the back of the house. The sounds of the party are closer now. I open the kitchen door. Hester’s black housekeeper (Mrs. Hollis, I presume) looks at me and says nothing. I take a deep breath and walk through the kitchen and into the living room.

It is fifteen minutes to midnight.

They are all masked, and I do not know who they are. There is music floating from a phonograph and they flit past me in glittering costumes and I have no clues to their separate hidden identities as they go by.

A tall skeleton, white bones against black cloth, grinning skull mask and black eyes burning in hole sockets bends over me as I mix myself a drink, and says, “Who are you, mister?” and I say, “Guess,” and he dances away, showing me his back and the gaps where the snappers on his costume are imperfectly fastened. There is a woman, I think she is a woman, a matriarch in long peach gown and wide-brimmed hat, parasol slung over her arm, chalk-white face and brilliantly rouged lips. She stalks me relentlessly about the room as I wander from group to group hoping to recognize, and at last her dowager’s limping gait brings her to my side and she leans into my ear and whispers, “Did it go well?” and I answer, Yes, and move away waving my W.M.U. pennant

Sara is Mata Hari, I catch glimpses of her as she wanders through the crowd, the only face I recognize, and that only barely. She wears a black silk dress cut low in the front, black-dyed ostrich feathers at the neckline and the hem. She has rented a black wig, bangs on the forehead, sleek and straight in the back where it falls away to the nape of her neck, long black false eyelashes, heavy blue eye shadow, dark lipstick, a black beauty spot at the corner of her mouth, a cigarette holder clenched between her teeth. She looks dark and mysterious and brooding and secretive, and she is drinking far too much and moving from one masked man to another, engaging each in conversation, flirting outrageously, seemingly unaware of my presence.

He appears at my side suddenly, the Lone Ranger in white hat and black mask, silver bullets in a cartridge belt, six-guns holstered. The Indian beside him, wearing feathers and war paint, fringed buckskin jacket and pants, leather mocassins, beaded belt hung with dagger and tomahawk, whispers, “Can you notice I’m not wearing a bra?” and both merge with the crowd. Someone murmurs, “Who was that masked man, Minnie?” and on the following crest of laughter, the Hunchback of Notre Dame crouches toward me, fixes me with a baleful cataracted glare, harelip pulled back over stained, crooked teeth, and cackles, “Five minutes to midnight, almost time.” A goblin, a gnome, the seeming issue of Quasimodo himself, materializes and babbles in a high excited voice, “Happy Halloween, happy Halloween!” I turn from him swiftly to find someone I recognize at last, Jean Trench, wetting her painted lips with a pink pointed tongue, wearing a black lace chemise, abundant white breasts bulging over its restraining top, black garters biting into her thighs, black net stockings, black patent leather high-heeled shoes.

“Hello, Jean,” I say. “You’re not wearing a mask.”

“Who the hell are you?” she says.

“Guess,” I say in the same drunken slur. “Where’s Victor?”

“Here someplace,” she says. “He came as a sultan. He’s a goddamn sultan.”

Sara approaches with a sidelong glide, skids to a stop before us, and lifts her half-empty glass so that it is just below Jean’s nose. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, miss?” she asks.

“What?” Jean says.

“Fuck off,” Sara tells her.

“What are you supposed to be?” Jean says.

“A pregnant college girl. Fuck off, I told you.”

“Charming,” Jean says, and swivels off, glancing back at me and wetting her lips once again.

“Charming,” Sara mimicks, and flits away toward the bar, moving in a blur of black ostrich feathers and silk, gleaming rhinestone bracelets, tilted cigarette holder, to embrace the portly sultan who must be Victor Koblenz, advising him as she kisses the tip of his mask nose that his sword is coming out of his scabbard, does he want everyone to see his sword that way in a public place? Koblenz is flabbergasted. He checks his sword, he checks his fly, he glances up quickly to beg elucidation, but Sara is gone again, quicksilver tonight, manic and cruel.

There is no mistaking Hester when she approaches. She is wearing the costume of a shapeless scarecrow, shabby dark suit with straw poking from collar and cuff, a stitched cotton mask covering her face, an old gray fedora jammed down around her ears. But there is something about the walk, something about the stiff carriage and erect head that suggest steel within the straw. The baggy trousers are, after all, trousers nonetheless, and Hester wears her balls like a wrestler.

“Is it you?” she says.

“It is I.”

“Good,” she says, and nods. “Is the party big enough for you?”

“Quite nice, thank you.”

“We try to please.”

“Hester,” I tell her, “I hope I never have the pleasure of working with you again.”

“My, my,” she says. “After all the nice things I said about you last night.”

“A momentary lapse, I’m sure.”

“On the contrary,” she says. “I meant them quite sincerely.”

“In which case, I thank you quite sincerely. I still hope I never see you again.” Because she cannot see my face behind the Old Grad’s mask, I nod for emphasis and wave the pennant twice. “Weglowski wants to be paid early tomorrow morning.”

“Epstein is in charge of money matters.”

“Will you tell him, please, to make delivery? I don’t want to find myself out on a limb because you people stiffed Weglowski.”

“Weglowski will be paid. It’s not your concern.”

Sara is back. She loops her arm through mine and presses herself against me. Her cigarette holder points wildly toward the ceiling. Her green eyes flash angrily through the heavy blue shadow. “What do you want, Pratt?” she says. “Leave him alone.”

Hester’s eyes through the holes in her mask are dark and suspicious. She glances from Sara to me, sensing a solidarity she had not guessed was there, and frightened by it now. Her expression is ludicrous, the featureless mask and the terrified eyes. I am tempted to laugh.

“I think you’ve had too much to drink, Sara,” she says.

“Not half enough,” Sara answers. There is a glittering edge to her voice. Her grip on my arm is fierce and tight The cigarette holder tilts dangerously close to Hester’s face, like a rapier.

“I don’t think we can risk a drunken Sara,” Hester says to me.

“I’m not drunk,” Sara snaps. “Right, Arthur?”

“Right, Sara.”

Hester’s eyes are growing more and more concerned. They peer nervously through the stitched holes in her mask, flashing panic onto the otherwise expressionless face. “Will she be driving tomorrow morning?” she asks me.

“She will be driving tomorrow morning,” Sara answers, and at that moment, someone shouts, “It’s midnight!”

“Show your face and then take her home,” Hester says. “She’s polluted.”

“The whole fucking world’s polluted,” Sara says.

They are taking their masks off everywhere around us. I remove mine quickly. I am here to show my face, and I do not plan to leave until everyone has seen it “I’ll give you five minutes,” Hester says.

“Why? What’s the hurry? Put Arthur to sleep so he can run out to die tomorrow?”

“Nobody’s going to die tomorrow.”

“Except everybody,” Sara says flatly. “We’re staying.”

“You’re leaving,” Hester says.

“Why? I’m the whole life of this whole boring party. I’m the only one here with any life in me.” She suddenly bursts into laughter. “Did you hear that, Arthur? Oh my God, that’s funny!”

“I’ll get your coat,” Hester says.

“Don’t bother, we’re not leaving,” Sara says. She leans against me. She puts her head on my shoulder. She sighs deeply and murmurs, “Oh, dear, dear, dear.” We stand silently, I with my arm around her, she with her head on my shoulder, eyes closed. With the party noises engulfing us, with the now-unmasked guests swirling by in a dazzle of color, exclaiming their surprise or their certainty (“I knew it was you,” the Lone Ranger shouts, recognizable now as Seth Wilson with faithful brassiereless Indian companion Adele by his side, “I knew it all along,” an opinion apparently not shared by Quasimodo who is Ralph the Hotel Eavesdropper, and who says to me snottily, “Cover an old grad face with an old grad mask? You sure had me fooled”), flitting by with oooohs and ahhhhs, I am being seen to the hilt and no one seems to notice the shoes. Koblenz the sultan comes over and says, “Ah, Mr. Sachs, very clever indeed, very clever.” Very clever, I think. We are all very clever. But Sara leans against me in basic black.

Hester returns almost at once.

“Quickly,” she says. “Get her out of here.”

“She is not a leper,” I mention.

I bundle Sara into her coat. She is wearing the long black coat tonight. It overwhelms her. “Thank you,” she says, as I button it over her breasts. “Thank you, Arthur.”

“Hurry,” Hester says.

We move swiftly toward the front door.

“If you need a driver in the morning, call me,” Hester says.

“I will.”

“Good luck,” she says.

In the entrance alcove, Jean Trench is leaning against the bookcases in her chemise and garters, impatiently tapping one high-heeled shoe, wetting her lips and chatting with an unmasked gentleman dressed as Frankenstein’s monster. The front door is open. On the walk outside, I catch a quick glimpse of the Lone Ranger striding swiftly toward a waiting red Volkswagen with a brassiereless Tonto behind the wheel. Sara pauses in the doorway, turns toward Jean Trench, and says, “Are you still here? I thought I told you to fuck off.”

Outside, it has begun to snow.

She has been in the bathroom puking since shortly after midnight, ever since we got back to the hotel. Each time I go in to her, she tells me to go away. She sits on the tiled floor with her head bent over the toilet bowl, retching drily, begging me to leave her alone. I listen to the sounds of her misery, and go back to her again and again, only to be sent away repeatedly. The vomiting does not stop until almost two a.m. I hear the water running in the sink. When she comes out of the bathroom, she is naked and shivering. She turns off the lamp and crawls into bed beside me.

“I’m cold,” she says. “So cold.”

I hold her close, but she continues to shiver, and at last I get out of bed, and go to my suitcase, and remove from it my yellow nightshirt. She refuses to put it on. In the darkness, she shakes her head and says, “I don’t want it, I don’t want it,” until finally I force it over her head, and thrust her arms into it, and she subsides and says, “I thought it was your wife’s nightgown,” and I say, “No, it’s my nightshirt,” and she quietly says, “Thank you.”

She is silent for several moments. Then she says, “I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right.”

“I’m so ashamed of myself.”

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I’m sorry you had to see me that way. Why did you keep coming back, Arthur?”

“To help you.”

“So ashamed.”

“You were sick…”

“Drunk, drunk.”

“I wanted to help you, that’s all. To take care of you.”

“Yes, now,” she says.

“What?”

“I have to throw up again, Arthur.”

She scrambles quickly out of bed, her hand cupped to her mouth. I follow immediately behind her. This time, she allows me to assist her. I support her head, I brush her long hair away from her face as she heaves drily. Afterward, I wet a cloth and take it to her where she lies pale and spent in bed. I put it on her forehead. She nods.

“Getting to be a goddamn habit,” she says.

“Shhh.”

“I’m so ashamed of myself.”

“Try to get some sleep, Sara. We have to get up early.”

“I wanted to make love,” she says. “Instead, I get so stupid drunk.”

“Never mind, darling. Go to sleep.”

“Forgive me.”

“It’s all right.” I turn off the lamp again, and settle into my pillow.

“Arthur, please forgive me,” she says in the darkness. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I know, darling, it’s all right.”

“I love you so much,” she says, and sighs. The room is still. She breathes evenly beside me. I find myself thinking of the bridge again. I look at my watch. It is almost two-thirty. I go over a checklist in my mind. I have rented a car with snow tires and skid chains; it is in the hotel garage next door. I have purchased a one-way airplane ticket to New York. I have packed my single suitcase, leaving out only my nightshirt (both nightshirts now), my toilet articles, and what I will wear in the morning.

“Arthur?”

“Yes, Sara?”

“No, nothing,” she says.

I have put the blasting machine in a cardboard box and wrapped it with pink paper and blue ribbon so that it looks like a gift package. There is nothing more to do. Except blow the bridge and run.

“Arthur?”

“Yes.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“Arthur?”

“Yes?”

“Arthur, please forgive me, I think I’m pregnant.”

I sit up in bed and reach across her for the lamp on the night table.

“No,” she says, “leave it off. Please.”

“What makes you think so, Sara?”

“What do you think makes me think so?”

“I mean, have you…?”

“I missed my period,” she says quietly. “I’m six days late.”

“Six days.”

“Yes.”

“That’s nothing at all, Sara. Some women…”

“I’ve never been late before. Not by six minutes.”

“I don’t see how you can decide on the basis of being only six days late…”

“Oh, please, Arthur!”

“I’m sorry, Sara, but I honestly think you’re reacting a bit hysterically.”

We are silent. I can hear my watch ticking. The room is black and fathomless.

“When were you supposed to get your period?” I ask.

“The twenty-seventh.”

“Are you sure of the date?”

“Yes, I circled it on the calendar. I always circle it.”

“The twenty-seventh was when?”

“Sunday.” ‘

“And today is?”

“Saturday. Don’t you know? You’re going to blow up a bridge, and you don’t even know…”

“It isn’t Saturday yet”

“It is.”

“It’s Friday.”

“It’s past midnight, that makes it Saturday.”

“Actually, you’re only five days late, if you want to get right down to it.”

“Arthur, would you mind telling me what the hell difference it makes? Five days or six days, would you mind telling me?”

“When do you figure you got pregnant, Sara?”

“The first time we made love.”

“Which was when?”

“Some total recall,” she says.

“Sara, I’m trying to figure this out, and I’d appreciate.

“It was a week ago Wednesday night, the twenty-third.”

“Sara,” I say, calmly and patiently, “it is physiologically impossible for a woman to conceive four days before she is expecting her period.”

“Fine.”

“I’m telling you.”

“Fine. Then I have nothing to worry about.”

“Nothing at all.”

“Except that I stopped taking the pill when I got back from Arizona last summer, and we made love last Wednesday night and I was supposed to get my period Sunday, and I didn’t, and I know very well I’m pregnant.”

“You’re not pregnant. Anyway, it’s not such a big deal, even if you are. You can get a legal abortion anywhere in the United States today. It’s not like it was years ago, when you had to run to Denmark or Puerto Rico.”

“Go to sleep, Arthur.”

“Anyway, you can’t possibly be pregnant.”

“I shouldn’t have told you. I don’t know why I told you. Don’t worry about it, Arthur.”

“I am worrying about it.”

“If I can’t possibly be pregnant, why are you worrying?”

“Because I don’t want you to be pregnant.”

“And I don’t want you to die,” she says, and suddenly she is weeping. I take her in my arms and hold her close and her tears spill onto my chest, and I think Oh, you are a wonderful fellow, Samuel Eisler, a charmer indeed. You came out here and found yourself a little girl who never told, or wept, or got drunk, and you taught her how to do all those things and maybe got her pregnant besides; you’re a fine upstanding gentleman, Samuel Eisler, you’re a prick.

I now know who I came here to kill.

I begin trembling.

Weeping, trembling, we cling to each other in the night.