Requiem for an Assassin

22

I FOUND A COUPLE Internet cafés and checked the bulletin boards. Nothing on either. Then, on foolish impulse, I Googled: “Jan Jannick bicycle Palo Alto.” The first hit was a front-page article in the Palo Alto Daily News. A bizarre accident, the article reported. Bicycle. Night. Rain. A tragedy. Jannick was survived by a wife and two small children, a boy and girl, all of whom were being cared for by relatives during this difficult time.

I purged the browser and rubbed my eyes. No choice, I reminded myself. It was Jannick or Dox. Jannick or Dox.

I stopped at a place called Katz’s Delicatessen at Houston and Ludlow. The food was good, but I ate with neither hunger nor relish, only to keep my body going. Finally, I drove out to Great Neck and checked in at the Andrew, where I took the hottest bath I could stand, trying to boil the tension out of myself.

I lay in bed afterward, exhausted but unable to sleep. A thousand fragmented images and voices pressed close inside my head, each a hungry demon, gnawing at my mind. Then, in the midst of that mental cacophony, I heard a single voice, Delilah’s, telling me about choice, how it was within me to make the right one, that it was my choices that would make me who and what I am. I seized on her voice, followed it, and it began to drown out the others.

And then, for the second time that evening, my eyes filled with tears, this time at the tenuous, terrifying hope that maybe Delilah had been right. That, improbably, even accidentally, I had proved her right. And that, if I could do it once, I could do it another time. And another after that.

You can, I told myself, again and again, my lips forming the words like a prayer, an incantation. You can. You can. And, breathing that silent mantra, clutching it as though it was my last and only hope, finally, fitfully, I slept.