Breathless

presence.
    During his years in public service, he had come to realize that he was a beast whose cruelest instincts were barely governed by the few tools of repression with which his upbringing and his culture provided him. Not long ago, he had decided to unchain himself and to be what he truly was. A monster. Not yet a monster fully realized, but certainly now a monster in the making.
    In the house, he found Nora at the kitchen sink, deftly skinning potatoes with a swivel-blade peeler.
    Eventually Henry would want a woman, although not to cook his meals. Nora was sufficiently attractive to excite him, and there was a perverse appeal to going by force where his brother had gone by invitation.
    She didn’t realize he had entered the room until he asked, “Does the house have a cellar?”
    “Oh. Henry. Yes, it’s a good big cellar. Potatoes keep well down there for the better part of the winter.”
    She would keep well there, too, but he decided against her. When the time came to get a woman, he would be better off with a younger and more easily intimidated specimen, one who had not grown strong from farm work.
    “Where’s Jim?” she asked.
    “In the barn. He sent me to get you. He thinks something’s wrong with one of the horses.”
    “Wrong? What’s wrong?”
    Henry shrugged. “I don’t know horses.”
    “Which is it—my Beauty or Samson?”
    “The one in the second stall.”
    “Samson. Jim loves that horse.”
    “I don’t think it’s serious,” Henry said. “But it’s something.”
    After rinsing her hands under the faucet and quickly drying them on a dishtowel, Nora hurried out of the kitchen.
    Henry followed her through the house and onto the front porch.
    Descending the steps, she said, “So you’ve never ridden?”
    “Only things that have wheels,” he said.
    “There’s nothing like saddling up and riding to the high meadows on a crisp day. The world’s never more right than it is then.”
    Crossing the yard toward the barn, he said, “You make it sound appealing. Maybe I should learn.”
    “You couldn’t find a better riding instructor than Jim.”
    “Successful farmer, poet, horseman. Jim is a hard act to follow, even for an identical twin.”
    He spoke only to have something to say, to keep her distracted. Nothing in his words revealed his intentions, but something in his tone or some unintended inflection given one word or another must have struck her as wrong.
    Half a dozen steps short of the barn, Nora halted, turned, and frowned at him. Whatever she heard in his voice must have been even more evident in his face, because her eyes widened with recognition of his nature.
    Our five senses are in service to our sixth, and the sixth is the intuitive sense of danger to body or soul.
    He knew that she knew, and she confirmed her knowledge by taking a step backward, away from him, and then another step.
    When Henry withdrew the pistol from under his jacket, Nora turned to run. He shot her in the back, again as she lay facedown.
    After putting away the gun, he turned her on her back. He seized her by the wrists and dragged her into the barn and placed her beside her husband.
    The first shot must have killed her instantly. Her heart had pumped little blood from her wounds.
    Her eyes were open. For a long moment, Henry stared intothem, into the nothing that had once appeared to be something, into the truth of her, which was that she had always been nothing.
    Until this day, he had never killed anyone. He was pleased to know that he could do it, pleased also that he felt neither guilt nor anxiety.
    Like Hamlet, he had no moral existence, no sense of any sacred order. Unlike Hamlet, his condition did not cause him to despair.
    Henry’s major at Harvard had been political science. He minored in literature.
    Prince Hamlet had something to teach those in either discipline. In literature classes, he was assumed to be a tragic figure, sworn to enforce the laws of a sacred order in which he could no longer believe. In certain political-science circles, he was used to illustrate that violence and anarchy can be preferable to indecision.
    Henry lived free of despair and indecision. He was a man of his time and, he liked to think, perhaps a man for the ages.
    Later, he would use the couple’s backhoe to excavate their final resting place. In the Land Rover lay a fifty-pound bag of lime, which he would pour atop them in their grave, to facilitate decomposition and to mask the odor of it,