She got up, went to the door, and listened, then went out into the hall, made her way to the nearest fire exit, down one floor, and out into a sickly warm city afternoon.
Still feeling weak, she went into a nearby drugstore and bought some vitamins. Suddenly, she felt almost hopeful about Benek, and also bought a pregnancy test.
After what seemed an endless willing of her body to walk home, she climbed the front steps, fumbled with her key and pushed through the front door, then staggered down the long hallway. Another age passed as she besieged her front door.
In the kitchen, she applied some ice to her head and sat down at the old wooden table. Drops of blood spotted the surface, and stopped.
23
Benek scrambled up the pile of rubble and saw her standing just above him, a dark shape barely visible in the streetlights. The ruin of her South Bronx apartment building towered behind her against a starry sky. A chill wind was pushing a blanket of clouds up from the horizon.
“Give yourself up!” he shouted without much hope.
Two searchlights found her, but she stood motionless, hatred fixing her face into a mask of tightly drawn skin and bared teeth.
“It’s just a woman,” a cop said from the darkness at Benek’s right. “And she’s not armed.”
“Stay back!” Benek called out to the squad of six at his left, but they were already sprinting forward to their deaths.
One fell.
Benek found him with his flashlight and saw blood in the nose and ears. The man’s steaming brain was by his head, lacerated by the brick and glass rubble of the lot. Benek cringed, knowing that he might be torn from himself at any moment. He reached into an empty holster under his arm. His only hope now was that one of the others would shoot her, but no one knew enough to see that bullets were the only way. They didn’t even have to be silver. She was only a dozen feet above him, staring at him as she coiled her will to strike. It was all that mattered to her now. She had nothing to lose.
“Shoot!” he cried. “For God’s sake, shoot her!” His words shook him like violent prayers.
Dark figures fell at his left and right, as if shot by silencers, and no one knew why they fell on the hill of rubble. No one would ever know.
She was saving him for last. He had the sudden conviction that if he could only shout the truth loudly enough, then he would be believed and they would all know, and it would be enough to save the world. But how could he say it all in one single cry? The revelation was a big mass in his throat, refusing to come out, its truth choking him to death, as it would all those who might guess it after him.
One word. That was all it might take to say it all, to get it into the minds of all within hearing distance.
“Walls!” he cried. That was the word. “We need more walls!”
There it was, the truth of ages, the cure for all wars, all murders, all the cruelties that passed through weaker walls from one mind to another, through hands that mocked a wall, that did not love a wall, that hated walls and would enforce togetherness...
Even a benign fall of walls, in which everyone might become present in everyone else’s mind, like a blinding light going on in the darkness of individualities, would create an embarrassment of knowledge, with no private refuge from the best and worst of each individual...
A proportion was needed—enough individuality to be secure and happy in yourself, enough shared personality to have a society. One direction was a fall into a dungeon of self, the other the emergence of a single mind...
The desperate need for walls was the only truth worth knowing and shouting, as the walls between people fell down all around the world and brutality tore out reason, as Dierdre’s way swept the world in a plague of debraining wars which only a few, and finally only two, would survive...
Alone and walled up in himself, Benek opened his eyes in her bed and listened to the blood pounding in his ears. A human being with high blood pressure, he had read somewhere, was like a light bulb that burns brighter after being struck, just before the filament burns out. He might even feel quite fit, nourished by engorged blood vessels, until one burst in his brain...
“Women always want something,” his father said to him again, in a voice clear and strong out of the abyss. “They don’t know what they want, even when they get it, but it doesn’t matter, because their bodies know.” His voice was clear of drink, speaking as Benek had never heard it. “A man comes before a woman like a beggar, hoping that she’ll smile and find him worthy, or even show mercy and give him what he’s been wound up like a toy to need. It’s a woman who is a man’s first judge—the mother who can’t help but see whether her boy will succeed with
her
kind. In his young manhood, women push a man to fulfill the purpose of an ancient relay race. In his last years, when he is no longer necessary, they tolerate him, and finally bury him...”
In his father’s voice Benek understood Dierdre. She was a souped-up deployment of a normal human being’s needs. Ignorance, lies, and malign animus were already present and waiting to be amplified in a species that pointed all its weapons at itself.
She had gone to Reddy now, and the captain would not have the slightest chance of comprehending the power of uniquely enabled impulses that had come for him. Her ability tempted her constantly, but she had only the wildest ideas of how to benefit from it.
She might have secured a research stipend for the rest of her life if she were willing to submit to study. He imagined her trying to play academic politics. As a subject of research she would be imprisoned behind one-way mirrors and closed-circuit cameras. She would be a constant threat, no matter what assurances she gave. Her power implied all sorts of things about physical laws and the human mind, but she would never permit herself to be studied for long, no matter how luxurious a prison might be built to hold her. She would never be able to contribute to human betterment. She would dream of armies falling before her, nations bowing to her throne; she would be held helpless by her own corruption, and welcome it as one takes for granted the air one breathes, because she was a heaven and hell unto herself.
It would be just too difficult to capture her. The only safe way would be if she gave herself up, or revealed herself to trained observers, and that was unlikely. But no matter how often he thought about it, he could see no alternative to killing her; and there was no one to help him; no one to say that it was the right thing to do; and there would be no one later to help him live with it by telling him that he had done the right thing, that he had acted for a greater good than his own. He could not even warn Reddy, because the tally of dead would simply add up in another way. He had to wait, and kill her in a dream...
None of this had happened. He was trapped in someone else’s nightmare, unable to control it or wake up. He got up and started to dress, distantly aware that some part of him still knew what it was doing, reminding him that he had survived to finish his job, whatever the cost. The job did not care if he lived, did not find it necessary that he survive to finish it...
It did not matter that she had gone to empty Reddy. The captain’s death was a waiting distraction. Now was the time, he realized behind his softness, when she would not expect him to come after her.
He would have liked it better if he had planned it in another, more heroic way; but instead he had fallen apart in the crucial confrontation and failed to kill her. Now he was telling himself that here was the moment, the true moment he had been waiting for to redeem the lost ones. He would at least go through the motions.
He put on his jacket, took the gun out from the right hand pocket, checked it, then looked out the window and saw that it was a beautiful late autumn day. She had probably walked to the precinct, and might be coming back along the river walkway. He might be able to spot her before she saw him. Someone else would have to collect the rents.
He would be arrested, of course, and the bullet would match his gun, but he would tell them to open dead Reddy’s skull, and be saved by the emptiness inside his captain’s head. For a moment he imagined that he would bludgeon her to death. He might have killed her while she was sleeping, having awakened first. No, the truth was that he might fail to kill her at every opportunity. The only way was to try again. She had spared him for reasons that he didn’t understand, and neither did she, it seemed; all the world’s seeming was nothing to what hid behind it...
He was insane, he told himself as he went out the door. This was how it felt, and that was what it had to be, convincing, to be insanity; nothing was as convincing. In the last weeks he had slipped back and forth across the line several times without noticing that his delusions seemed too reasonable. He was quite sane, given his bizarre circumstances. Sanity or insanity was always a matter of circumstances that matched reality—but who was making the comparison?
He came to the front door, opened it, and hurried down the front steps, breathing in the fresh, cool air that seemed suddenly capable of making him clean again. The sky was a breathtaking blue ceiling, solid and close enough that he could reach up and touch it. Sunshine sparkled in the windows of the brownstone buildings, imprisoned by the glass. He grasped the gun in his pocket and sought his resolve, fearing that he would not find it because something had been broken irrevocably deep within him. Too many constraints had been loosened for him to care what happened to him. A good cop thinks about the people he has to protect. That still mattered. That was why he had abased himself before her, half planning it, half unable to control his fear, so he might make good on his failures, even if he had to sleepwalk to salvation.
For a moment she was beautiful in his mind, the dark-haired, porcelain princess whose love he would never win because she did not know that she had it to give. She had come to him from a lost kingdom to judge him and his kind—but she had taken too much away and he would judge her in kind.
He pitied her. What could be expected of her? That she not use her skill? A life of restraint, just like everyone else? For her to know others like her would not help. That was the way of the powerless. Some got along, and far too many killed each other. Why had he expected it to be different with her?
It would be a mercy to finish her off. He almost laughed. Keats’s woman without mercy knew enough not to expect much from her loitering knight, or he from her.
24
Dierdre saw him coming up the river walkway. He walked with his hands pushed down into his jacket pockets, unsteady on his feet, but she found the sight of him suddenly pleasing. He smiled shyly as he came toward her. She liked the lie.
“Sit down here on the bench,” he said, taking her arm. “What’s in the bag?”
“Vitamins and some stuff,” she said, smiling as she sat down and put the bag down next to her.
“Where’s your handbag?” he asked, putting his arm around her.
“I don’t... know,” she said, remembering how it had arced toward the river after she had thrown it, how the water had bubbled around it as it sank. “Maybe I left it at the drugstore. There wasn’t anything important in it.”
“What did Reddy say?” he asked, putting his cheek against hers and holding her close. His voice was soft and pleasant, his breath warm in her ear as if he were still inside her.
“It’s all up to you now,” she said. “Your job’s still there if you want it. I fixed it with Reddy.”
“I’m grateful,” he said as the sun slipped behind a cloud, and she felt something hard press against her side. “Don’t look at me,” he continued, “or I’ll squeeze the trigger. Look straight ahead at that barge on the river.”
“I think I’m pregnant,” she lied softly, and felt him hide his face in her shoulder—affectionately, it seemed to her, but the gun did not leave her ribs.
His breath was moist on her neck as he said, “There’s no one else to stop you now that Reddy’s dead. He is dead, isn’t he?”
She said, “I took him out in my handbag. He’s in the river.”
“Him,” he said. “Three pounds was all of him. Seems there should have been more, should be more of anyone.”
She started to look toward him, but he pushed the gun harder against her ribs. “What was he to you anyway?” she asked.
“My boss, and a human being, but that means nothing to you.”