Lancelot

offended her. I suggested that she had suffered the ultimate indignity, the worst violation a woman can suffer, rape at the hands of several men, forced fellatio, and so on, that I too had suffered my own catastrophe, and that since we had both suffered the worst that could happen to us and come through, not merely survived but prevailed, we were qualified as the new Adam and Eve of the new world. If we couldn’t invent a new world and a new dignity between man and woman, surely nobody could.
    Do you know that she took offense? In fact she flew into a rage. “Are you suggesting,” she said to me, “that I. myself, me, my person, can be violated by a man ? You goddamn men. Don’t you know that there are more important things in this world? Next you’ll be telling me that despite myself I liked it.”
    There is something to what she says. The other day I opened St. Augustine’s The City of God thinking to find what some of your best people had to say about the great questions, God and man and so on. And what do you think I found? The good saint devoting page after page soothing the consciences of nuns, virgins who had been raped by Visigoths and enjoyed it despite themselves. No doubt howled with delight.
    So Anna told me to shove off. Very well. I did. Perhaps it is better that way.
    I expected too much from her. I expected her to have made the same discovery I made, to have found the great secret of life, the old life that is, the ignominious joy of rape and being raped. We, I thought, she and I, were going to discover something better. And in her heart she knows the secret as well as I but she can’t bear to admit it. Can you blame her? But we would have made good pioneers in the new life because neither one of us could tolerate the old. Someday women will admit the truth, will refuse to accept it, and then they will be my best recruits.
    Oh, one last thing she said. She held my hand for a while after shaking hands goodbye. “When you get up there in Virginia,” she told me, “you’ll find a fallen-down house but a small solid-two-hundred-year-old barn. One side is a corn crib and a tack room with a loft. It would make a lovely cozy place to live in the winter and big enough for three.” Christ, do you think this is another woman trying to fix me up in a pigeonnier? Why is it that shelters for animals now seem more habitable than ordinary houses? Hm. A done-over corn crib. But she said big enough for three. I had the feeling that if she could take her revenge, shoot enough men to even the score, not only for herself but for the bad trick played on her and her sisters by God or biology or evolution or whatever, she then might settle down with me in a barn, and we could hold each other as lovers should do, cling to each other like children, while Siobhan frolicked in the loft. Do you think she’ll come?
    You look at me strangely. I don’t think I ever thanked you for listening to me. You know that I could not have told anyone else. Yes, I’m quite all right now. No, no confession forthcoming. Father, as you well know. But there is one thing … There is a coldness … You know the feeling of numbness and coldness, no, not a feeling, but a lack of feeling, that I spoke of during the events at Belle Isle? I told you it might have been the effect of the hurricane, the low pressure, methane, whatever. But I still feel it. That is, today, I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything—except a slight curiosity about walking down that street out there. What do you think of it, that there is a certain coldness… Do you feel it?
    The truth is that during all the terrible events that night at Belle Isle, I felt nothing at all. Nothing good, nothing bad, not even a sense of discovery. I feel nothing now except a certain coldness.
    I feel so cold. Percival.
    Tell me the truth. Is everyone cold now or is it only I?
    What? You remind me that I said in the beginning that there was something I wanted to ask you. Ah yes. Well, it doesn’t seem important now. Because there is no answer to the question. The question? Very well. The question is: Why did I discover nothing at the heart of evil? There was no “secret” after all, no discovery, no flickering of interest, nothing at all. not even any evil. There was no sense of coming close to the “answer” as there had been when I discovered the stolen money in my father’s sock