To Die For

She was so beautiful, he told me, she was to die for . I tried to think who in the world exactly I would die for. I couldn't think of anyone who might mean that much to me just for being beautiful.

He said he'd like to see her sometime outside work. She said, Fine. That would be nice. I'd like that. He said, Well, how about Wednesday? Are you busy Wednesday? She said, I can't do it on Wednesday. Sorry. He said, Well, maybe during the weekend, and she said, Yes, the weekend. So he asked about Saturday and she said, No, I can't do it then. An old friend's in town. So he brought up Sunday and she said, No, I'm seeing the family on Sunday. He said, Why don't we get together for lunch on Monday? She started to agree to Monday, but then remembered: Oh, I've got an appointment with my manicurist on Monday. I really can't. Well, he said, I guess we'll run into each other at the copy machine. Yes, she said, smiling. I'm sure we will.

"No," she said. "You're sick, and you make me miserable."
"Please."
"No."
"You sound as if you held me in utter contempt."
"Maybe I do have contempt for you," she said, exhaling smoke.

They'd met a few years earlier. He didn't ask her out until the sixth or seventh time she came into the bookstore to banter with him. That afternoon, they sat in a bar sipping their drinks, inwardly hypertense but outwardly calm. Suddenly she asked him if he had a girlfriend.

He said that he did.
"Does she know you're here with me?" she asked.
"No."
"Would she mind?"
He looked at her closely, pursed his lips, and didn't answer the question.

He was touched by the intensity of her lovemaking. Perhaps, he reflected, shewas trying to forget, in the oblivion of orgasm, the fact that she was doing something so fundamentally stupid. He did everything in his power to make it special for her.

Afterward, she lit a cigarette. For the span of a few moments he felt completely relaxed. Then he said, "Well, it's late. I've got to be going. "

She gathered the sheet around her with a jerk and turned her back on him.

There were smile wrinkles around his eyes, although the look in the eyes was stark; that was what she had first loved about him. That and him telling her during one of their first conversations that he was "existing in a state of despair," which had made them both laugh.

As she unbuttoned his shirt for the first time, she leaned close to his chest and kissed it.

He confessed one night, over a nice dinner in a fairly elegant restaurant, that he sometimes imagined her tied up and wearing a blindfold. Perhaps amused by this, perhaps aghast -- he could never tell, with her -- she looked at him for so long and so aggressively that he had to lower his gaze.

Then, as he sipped from his glass of wine, she said, "You know, you can do whatever you want with me."

I came home with a strip of pictures from a session with the school photographer and showed them to my mother, who took them from me and went into her bedroom, shutting the door behind her. I heard stifled sobs. At a loss for how to react, I sat at the kitchen table to read a comic book. My mother rushed into the kitchen, pulled the trash can out from beneath the sink, threw something in, and replaced the can before leaving the room without speaking to me. I waited, but the sobbing did not resume. I went to the sink and pulled out and looked into the trash can. At the bottom were some scraps of paper. Reaching in gingerly, I took them out one by one. My mother had cut up my school pictures withscissors.

I was out with my father. He did what he always did -- he drove. And I did what I always did -- I sat. Sometimes I looked at him, sometimes at things outside the car. He drove me back and forth across Amherst. He would stop the car outside a store and tell me to wait, that he'd be back shortly, and I would wait. He took his time. He had to pick up some dry cleaning, make a phone call, see someone about some business, etc. After a few hours of this, I piped up, "I need to go to the bathroom." He glanced at me with annoyance.

He pulled up at a phone booth and went into it. I squirmed more now that he couldn't see me, pushing with both hands on my groin and sweating from the pain. As soon as he got back into the car, I said, "Daddy."

He'd taken out his notebook and was jotting down something: he held up his free hand to still me. I began squirming harder. "Stop that," he said. He finished writing, replaced his notebook in the glove compartment, and started the car. He drove us slowly along the Strip. "Where do you want to eat?" he asked me. I said, "It doesn't matter." He pulled into the parking lot of a Hardee's, and I left the car at a trot.

By the time I came out of the restroom, Daddy had finished eating. He didn't look at me as we walked outside. In the car, he rolled down his window, then, with a sarcastic smile, reached over me and rolled down mine. He drove me back to my mother's apartment in the stink of piss. Stopped in front, he slapped me on the shoulder but said nothing -- not "Goodbye," not "I'msorry," not "You disgust me." Nothing. I got out of the car and went in quickly without looking back.

At school I imprint my hand on some clay, and at the end of the day take it home to Mommy. She's pleased by this gift and hangs it on the wall by a length of twine.

He wouldn't admit it to anyone, but he was in love with the girl who belonged to his best friend. Whenever they went out to restaurants together, he did his best to dissemble the nervous tremor he always felt on seeing her. She always laughed when he leaned close to her to kiss her cheek hello. "Hello," he said.

Possibly the best friend sensed nothing of this turmoil, but still -- one couldn't help wondering.

It all happened so suddenly. They disappeared all at once from the streets of our towns and cities into a region, dubbed The Zone, which had lacked any fixed boundaries until the coils of barbed wire and military checkpoints went up overnight, defining its wide perimeter.

Our houses went unscrubbed. There was no one in them to cook, or to deal with the piles of dirty dishes and pots. Our wide suburban lawns, unwatered for days, turned harshly brown. Trash bags piled up on the sidewalks and, as the garbage began to rot, these pyramids of unclaimed waste made perfect homes for hordes of skittering rats.

But that wasn't the worst of it. Every day, dull explosions collapsed apartment buildings, sending up columns of smoke. Car bombs blew holes in banks and department stores, leaving bloody and inconceivable chaos to reign amid the fuming debris. Military vans rushed through the streets, sirens bleating. Our simplest actions seemed fraught with unforseeable consequences.

And all over the country it was wondered aloud: Had the signs been present in Their eyes all along? Had They plotted it all out far in advance? Andwere They all it together, or was only a small, radical group of Them to blame for the current confusion?

The newspaper reports contradicted one another wildly. Hysteria crept into the radio announcers' crackling voices. "Ethnic hatred," "hostile containment" -- our vocabulary became swollen with such surreal words and phrases, just as certain rivers were said to be packed from bank to bank with anonymous corpses.

Then, almost as abruptly as it had started, it was over. The starved-looking, surprisingly meek men and women appeared in the streets with brooms and buckets. The mounds of sour garbage vanished overnight. Gradually, our lawns turned green again under the haze of softly hissing sprinklers. The hedges were pruned. And the coils of razor wire that had defined the entry and exit points of The Zone were unstrung and hauled away to wherever such items are stored for future emergencies.

But The Zone, having become a part of our language, wasn't to be dispelled so easily. However shapeless it may have been in theory, one could always be sure of whether one was or was not there.

There was once a man who wanted another kind of life. He was tired of his own shapeless life, as he was tired of the dark and shapeless clothes he wore. He was tired of living in gloomy narrow rooms and of taking the bus to work in the mornings and then home in the evenings. He was tired of his friends. He was tired of his language and of the city where he had been born long ago -- the one in which he still, unfortunately, lived. One day as he was getting out of a bus it struck him that his entire life had been accidental. In his dank, narrow apartment with a view of a rear courtyard, he packed a suitcase with a few of his books, some shirts, several silk ties and pairs of trousers, and an extra pair of shoes. He decided to wear his only suit so that he'd at least look decently turned out for his adventure.

His suitcase tugged one arm lower than the other. As he walked out of the city through one of its looming old gates, he had a sense of freedom so wild and sharp that it hurt. He thought he'd just go on walking until sunset and thenthink about where to sleep.

As the sun sank below the hills the air chilled. He found himself in a distant suburb. He went into a small, well-lit gas station and called a taxi from the pay phone. When it came, he gave his own address and sat as still as he could on the bouncing spring seat watching the lights of the houses speed by.

As the taxi pulled up at the curb, he craned his neck to gaze up at the cement high rise in which he lived. Then he paid the driver and stepped out, flushed with new awareness and exhausted from the long trip.

All this time had passed and what had he learned? And what had he done? Nothing. That was the truth. In the end, in his long life he had learned and had done nothing.

He was still learning nothing -- he was still doing nothing. Every day, he thought, pressing his lips together with a grim, tight satisfaction, he did nothing, and also every day he learned nothing. His, he reflected, was a slow, painful schooling in dissolution. Destination: oblivion. He sat on a park bench in the shade of tall spreading elms through the leaves of which light shone in patches. There were dead leaves scattered around the bench.

Through the overhanging elm branches he could, by raising his head ever so slightly, gaze at a rather ornate fountain shooting up jets of water into sunlight. Water dribbled in streams from the sea serpent's scaly coils around the rim of the upper basin into the pool of the lower, past the greenish-black statues of wet stone -- gargantuan men and women sitting or reclining in positions that suggested lethargy or even total surrender to some monumental weariness.

There were people walking or standing around the fountain -- yet he, the protagonist of this story which is not really a story at all, felt within him a deeper affinity to the statues than to them, if only for the sad composure the statues exhibited in their lack of the slightest trace of movement.

At last, at long last he was thinking nothing, as well as learning and doing nothing. At long last, he thought. At long last it was all coming to him. Long last it was all falling down. It was all falling away and it was nothing he was learning, nothing he was doing. At last. At long last. All this time he had been alive, since he was a small boy, and he wasstill looking at things, still thinking about what he saw, but not exactly in the same way as he ever had. So -- how did he get from those lost moments of the past to the vanishing moments of the present?

He was full of noises, and these noises were his lungs breathing, his heart beating. He had the sensation of sunlight on his skin, his naked skin, and the pulse moving and the blood surging in his temples, just under the skin. He shut his eyes and saw the red glow of sunlight through his closed eyelids. Oh I wonder wonder who wrote the Book of Oblivion.

Perhaps in the end he'd go home to his desk and, sitting on his chair, would pick up and uncap his fountain pen and write on a sheet of clean notepaper a sentence such as, but not necessarily identical to, the following: "He looked through overhanging branches at a fountain splashing water into sunlight, and at the streams of water pouring from the upper bowl to the lower basin past the oversized statues of wet greenish black stone sitting or reclining, and it seemed to him suddenly that he had more in common with those statues than with the figures walking or standing around the fountain."

He thought of his life and it seemed to him that he had done nothing, had learned nothing, and would come to nothing -- yet here he was. Doing what? Whatever it was he was doing, that is him.

As always there is the problem of what he will someday, given the opportunity and favorable circumstances that only luck can provide, write.

He sat with the glow of sunlight on him, on his eyelids, on his naked skin. He felt this glow within, in the darkness behind his closed eyelids, in what was most deeply him but possibly not him at all. I am the one, he thought, who thinks that this is. So thinking that this is being me. The one that I am.

But, he wondered, sinking into the dark bewilderment that had become so familiar to him by now, and which he realized might only culminate in exhaustion and perhaps even in the loss of the impulse to pose any more such questions, how can I be the same one I was then? It was clearly impossible to connect the one he was now either to the "he" of his reflections or to the protagonist of any story he might one day find it in him to tell.