Eyes of Prey

cried until my friend came home. They didn’t even give me a transfusion at the hospital,” Cassie said. “Good thing, too. This was back when there was AIDS in the blood supply. Though who’d ever know, with me fuckin’ actors, and all.”
    “Jesus, that makes me feel good . . . .” He looked down at himself.
    “Maybe you oughta run dip it in Lysol . . .” she said.
    “Don’t have any Lysol—I got some Oven-Off,” he said, and laughed. She grinned and patted his leg. “So what were you going to do? Your guns?”
    He looked at her for a minute and then nodded. “Yeah. I’ve got a gun safe down in the basement. It was like they were glowing down there, the guns. Glowing with some kind of gravity, or magnetism, or something. I could feel them wherever I was, pulling me down there. It didn’t make any difference if I was on the other side of Minneapolis, I could feel them. I carry a gun, but I never thought about using it. It was the guns in the safe, pulling me down.”
    “You ever go down? Just to look, or handle them? Stick one in your ear?”
    “Nope. I would of felt stupid,” Lucas said.
    She threw back her head and laughed, but not a happy laugh; an acknowledgment. “I think a lot of suicides are avoided because you’d feel stupid. Or because of the way you’d look afterwards. Like hanging . . .” She gripped herself around the throat and squeezed, crossing her eyes and sticking her tongue out.
    “Jesus,” he said, laughing again.
    She turned serious. “Did you think about it because everything was too painful, or what?”
    “No. I just couldn’t handle what was going on in my head, this, this storm. I couldn’t sleep: I’d have these crazy fucking episodes where nine million thoughts would go pounding through my head, and I couldn’t stop them. Crazy shit. You know, like the names of people in my senior class, or all the guys on the hockey squad, and all kinds of bizarre shit, and you get crazy because you forget a couple of them.”
    “That’s pretty common,” Cassie said, nodding.
    “But basically, I thought about the guns because it didn’t seem to make any difference whether I lived or died. It was like, Heads I live, tails I die—and if you keep flipping, it’ll come up tails, sooner or later.”
    Cassie nodded. “There was a guy I knew in New York, he used to play Russian roulette with a revolver. About once a year he’d spin that thing, that . . .”
    “Cylinder.”
    “Yeah. Then he’d put the barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger. Right around Christmastime. Said it kept him straight for a whole ’nother year.”
    “What happened to him?” Lucas asked.
    “I don’t know. He wasn’t that good a friend. He was still alive the last time I was in New York. I could never figure out if he was lucky or unlucky.”
    “Huh.”
    She stretched out again, her hands behind her head, and they lay beside each other in comfortable silence for a minute. “Did you have the voice in the back of your head, watching you go through all this shit?” she asked finally.
    “Yeah. The watcher. It was like having my own critic back there. My own journalist.”
    She giggled. “I never thought of it that way, but that’s it. Like, the major part of me was hacking away with a bread knife—”
    “Ah, fuck, a bread knife?”
    “Yeah, the kind with the serrated blade?”
    “Ah, Jesus . . .”
    “Good brand, too, Solingen . . .”
    “God, Cassie . . .”
    “Anyway, the big part was hacking away, and this little voice was back there reporting on it, like CNN or something. Kind of skeptical, too.”
    “Jesus.” He reached out and stroked her, from navel to breasts, and back down across her groin to the inside of her knee.
    “Pretty gross, huh? Anyway, I’m glad you’re getting better.”
    “I’m not really sure I am . . . .”
    “Oh, you are.” She patted the bed. “You’re here. When you’re really depressed, your sex life jumps in a car and leaves for Chicago. I was in this group, as part of the therapy, and every one of the men said so. It wasn’t that they couldn’t—they just couldn’t stand the thought of the complications. Sex is the first thing to go. When it comes back, you’re definitely getting better.”
     
    The phone rang at eleven o’clock. Lucas woke clear-eyed, rested, already rolling toward the edge of the bed before he was aware of the weight on the other side. He’d slept, and dreamed, and had almost