And so, falling now, falling before her, falling before all possibility, my head in the penitent’s crouch between her knees, my tongue in the penitent’s curl in her cunt, my body in the penitent’s curve in the snow and redness of her culmination I lay there while the full sounds of the afternoon passed over me for the first time, the full meaning of her body passed through my clutching hands for the first time and the uneven pounding and shouts outside of the diminishing door might have been a true and final counterpoint to that mutuality of need which had sent all of us to the FARMER’S REST that afternoon, past the sunken highways of our destiny.
D’Arcy fell as he said these last words, fell lengthwise to the mottled rug and then rolled over on his back, his eyes sunken and huge, focused on the ceiling, his chest falling uneasily. I put my pen shakily into the pages of my notebook and looked at him. I could feel the sweat dart out on my palms and with it a feeling of apprehension, almost as if someone would break through in the instant past the walls of the room and discover us in this confidentiality of loss. But after some time I recovered my voice and said to him very quietly, “I’m not going to pick you up, you know. You’re going to have to get up from there yourself; you. You’ll have to do it.”
He said nothing, attempted to make a sound, his voice a croak in the room. I considered him. I was in no hurry, finally. There was nothing before us but completion.
“I said get up,” I said.
“Oh God,” he muttered. “Oh God, God.”
“None of that is going to do you any good, now. You’re going to have to pick yourself up from the floor.”
“I can’t,” he whispered. “I think I injured something.”
I closed my notebook and put it carefully beside me on the table. I would need it later; it was the only record.
“You killed her,” I said.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You killed that girl. You killed her in that motel. That’s what you were trying to say to me. Wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know.” He scrambled at the floor, rolling to his stomach, managed to raise himself to his knees. Hated D’Arcy. Destructive D’Arcy. Killer D’Arcy. “What does it matter?”
“And they found you there. After you had killed her.”
“No, no, it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all.”
“Then how was it? How did they find you?”
“No,” he said, “no, no.”
“I have to finish my book. How can I finish it unless I know? They found her corpse under your thighs.”
“It wasn’t that way.”
“Her corpse was already stretched in the strophe of suffocation, her eyes full, wide and bulging, the blood running down the two of you, the broken limbs, the broken glass. You shrieked with laughter as you opened the door to their pounding; you trembled with a fanatic’s glee as you showed them her body.”
“I tell you it didn’t happen that way. You couldn’t know. How could you know this?”
“And you struggled not against their embrace—against the wedge of Elmer’s shoulders, that is—as they took you away, leaving the car still insolently parked off-angle from your cabin.”
“No, no, no, no. No, no.”
“That’s what you did,” I said.
“I didn’t mean to. I didn’t understand what was happening until it was too late. I didn’t want a girl. I didn’t want a girl to be that way. There are ways and ways.”
“You wanted her to be inert and glossy, as everything else you had fucked and she wasn’t. So you killed her then and left her corpse to Elmer, willed your history to possibility.”
“I didn’t mean it to be that way. She didn’t understand. None of them understood. She forced me.”
“And they took you away and in time took the battered corpse and took it on a different journey.”
“Yes,” D’Arcy gasped, struggling to his feet and trying to reach the decanter, finding it and funneling it into his mouth with a desperate gesture. “That was the way it was.”
“I know.”
“I must drink.”
“Drink,” I said. “Drink, drink, drink. Drink your life away, D’Arcy, for your journey has now begun.”
He held on to the decanter stuffing the neck down his mouth, ingesting the fluids and I let him, seeing the silt rise toward the top, seeing the workings of the cords of his neck. It didn’t matter, now. None of it mattered. I took my pen and gripped it. He put the decanter down with a gasp.
“So that completes it. That’s all that there is to say. Now you can leave and write your book. Go to the sea.”
“Not yet,” I said. “Not just yet, D’Arcy. There is one more thing I must do before that.”
“What?”
“You know what it is,” I said.
I raised the pen and advanced toward him.
And with a fine distancing stroke, a triumph of leverage and patience and luck, I drove the pen point smoothly, inevitably through his temple and deep into his brain. It penetrated to the clip, only a faint streak of color remaining outside to give any indication that the pen was there.
“That’s what I had to do,” I said. “You left me no alternative.”
He fell slowly before me; collapsing in pieces, bits of him strewn before the others and tumbled in a heap, his mouth opened, his eyes wide and pleading and desperate in the cave of his face. He seemed upon the point of saying something but he had absolutely nothing to say.
