Two Much!

47

Then, of course, i was really terrified.

“No no no no no!” I shouted, but there weren’t enough no’s in the world to overpower that simple yes. But I hadn’t meant it. I’d never meant to kill anybody. Not even to hurt anybody.

Maybe he wasn’t dead. The gun still in my hand, as though glued there, I crawled over on hands and knees to where he was lying crumpled against the wall next to the door, and I peeked at his face to see if maybe his eyes were open.

Oh, dear. I swallowed a sudden hint of dinner and looked very quickly away again. You don’t have a face like that if you’re alive. That wasn’t something you could take to a fix-it shop, oh, no, that was something broken for good.

Broken for good.

I have known terror before in my life, such as when I’m in the closet and the suspicious husband is tramping around in the bedroom and the wife is making shrill suggestions that they go out to a movie, and I know what such terror feels like. It feels hot and electric and red, full of buzzing and tiny explosions. That was the terror I’d felt most recently when I had my hand on Volpinex’s arm and tried to talk him into making some sort of deal, and until now that was the only kind of terror I’d ever known.

But now I’d met the real thing, the terror below that one, the terror that makes that one seem like a simple case of hypertension. And I’ll tell you what real terror is like. It’s a wet green swamp with no bottom, and the filthy water coming into your nostrils. It’s a small and slimy toad inside your body, eating your bowels and your stomach, leaving a bile-smeared hollow inside you from your brittle ribs to your exposed genitals. It’s not being able to reverse time for even one second, for one tiny miserable second, to undo the unthinkable. It’s Volpinex with a face like a First World War atrocity case and no more life in him than a sausage.

I don’t know how long I stayed there, sunk back on my haunches as I refused to look any more at Volpinex, continuing to hold the gun because it hadn’t yet occurred to me to put it down, but I was finally getting shakily to my feet — with no idea at all what I would do next, how I would get out of this, what the moves were that followed this one — when all at once Betty was standing in the bedroom doorway, staring open-mouthed at me, at the gun, at Volpinex. And then shrieking.

“Betty,” I said, “listen to me.” But even I couldn’t hear my voice in the midst of those shrieks of hers.

And for what happened next I blame the motion picture industry of America. I had ceased to function as a thinking, planning intelligence, I had become a character in a specific sequence.

Three characters: two male, one female. One of the males is dead, shot by the other. The female arrives, sees, screams, turns, runs away. We’ve all seen mis sequence, in how many movies? And she runs toward the staircase, she always runs toward the staircase. And the man with the gun lifts it and fires. That’s what he does, every time.

Every time.