Fear Nothing

though it were a cape, and I fled unseen, avoiding light for more than one reason now, a shadow flowing liquidly through shadows, as though I were the fabled Phantom, escaped from the labyrinth underneath the opera house, now on wheels and hell-bent on terrorizing the world above ground.
        Being able to entertain such a flamboyantly romantic image of myself in the immediate aftermath of murder doesn't speak well of me. In my defense, I can only say that by recasting these events as a grand adventure, with me in a dashing role, I was desperately trying to quell my fear and, more desperately still, struggling to suppress the memories of the shooting. I also needed to suppress the ghastly images of the burning body that my active imagination generated like an endless series of pop-up spooks leaping from the black walls of a funhouse.
        Anyway, this shaky effort to romanticize the event lasted only until I reached the alleyway behind the Grand Theater, half a block south of Ocean Avenue, where a grime-encrusted security lamp made the fog appear to be brown and polluted. There, I swung off my bike, let it clatter to the pavement, leaned into a Dumpster, and brought up what little I had not digested of my midnight dinner with Bobby Halloway.
        I had murdered a man.
        Unquestionably, the victim had deserved to die. And sooner or later, relying on one excuse or another, Lewis Stevenson would have killed me, regardless of his coconspirators' inclination to grant special dispensation to me; arguably, I acted in self-defense. And to save Orson's life.
        Nevertheless, I'd killed a human being; even these qualifying circumstances didn't alter the moral essence of the act. His vacant eyes, black with death, haunted me. His mouth, open in a silent scream, his bloodied teeth. Sights are readily recalled from memory; recollections of sounds and tastes and tactile sensations are far less easily evoked; and it is virtually impossible to experience a scent merely by willing it to rise from memory. Yet earlier I'd recalled the fragrance of my mother's shampoo, and now the metallic odor of Stevenson's fresh blood lingered so pungently that it kept me hanging on to the Dumpster as if I were at the railing of a yawing ship.
        In fact, I was shaken not solely by having killed him but by having destroyed the corpse and all evidence with brisk efficiency and self-possession. Apparently I had a talent for the criminal life. I felt as though some of the darkness in which I'd lived for twenty-eight years had seeped into me and had coalesced in a previously unknown chamber of my heart.
        Purged but feeling no better for it, I boarded the bicycle again and led Orson through a series of byways to Caldecott's Shell at the corner of San Rafael Avenue and Palm Street. The service station was closed. The only light inside came from a blue-neon wall clock in the sales office, and the only light outside was at the soft-drink vending machine.
        I bought a can of Pepsi to cleanse the sour taste from my mouth. At the pump island, I opened the water faucet partway and waited while Orson drank his fill.
        “What an awesomely lucky dog you are to have such a thoughtful master,” I said. “Always tending to your thirst, your hunger, your grooming. Always ready to kill anyone who lifts a finger against you.”
        The searching look that he turned on me was disconcerting even in the gloom. Then he licked my hand.
        “Gratitude acknowledged,” I said.
        He lapped at the running water again, finished, and shook his dripping snout.
        Shutting off the faucet, I said, “Where did Mom get you?”
        He met my eyes again.
        “What secret was my mother keeping?”
        His gaze was unwavering. He knew the answers to my questions. He just wasn't talking.

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    27
        
        I suppose God really might be loafing around in St. Bernadette's Church, playing air guitar with a companion band of angels, or games of mental chess. He might be there in a dimension that we can't quite see, drawing blueprints for new universes in which such problems as hatred and ignorance and cancer and athlete's-foot fungus will have been eliminated in the planning stage. He might be drifting high above the polished-oak pews, as if in a swimming pool filled with clouds of spicy incense and humble prayer instead of water, silently bumping into the columns and the corners of the cathedral