Life Expectancy

instructor."
        "And teaching ballet prepares you to put out a man's eye?"
        "Of course not, silly. I don't teach ballet. I give ballroom-dancing lessons. Fox-trot, waltz, rumba, tango, cha-cha, swing, you name it."
        Just my luck: to be cuffed to a beautiful woman who turns out to be a ballroom-dance instructor, and me a lummox.
        "You'll flinch," I insisted, "and you'll miss his eye, and he'll shoot us dead."
        "Even if I flub it," she said, "which I won't, but even if I do, he won't shoot us dead. Haven't you been paying attention? He needs hostages."
        I disagreed. "He doesn't need hostages who try to stab him in the eye."
        She raised her eyes as if imploring the heavens beyond the ceiling:
        "Please tell me I'm not shackled to a pessimist and a coward."
        "I'm not a coward. I'm just responsibly cautious."
        "That's what every coward says."
        "That's also what every responsibly cautious person says," I replied, wishing I didn't sound so defensive.
        At the far end of the room, the maniac began to pound one fist against the newspaper he was reading. Then both fists. Pounding and pounding like a baby in a tantrum.
        Face contorted fearsomely, he made inarticulate noises of rage. Some rough Neanderthal consciousness, remnant in his genes, seemed to break free from the chains of time and DNA.
        Fury informed his voice, then frustration, then what might have been a wild grief, then fury once more and escalating. This was the performance of an animal howling with loss, its rage rooted in the black soil of misery.
        He pushed his chair back from the table, picked up his pistol. He emptied the remaining eight rounds in the magazine, aiming at the newspaper he had been reading.
        The hard report of each shot boomed off the vaulted ceiling, rang off the brass shades of the inverted torchieres, and crashed back and forth between the metal filing cabinets. I felt echoes of each concussion humming in my teeth.
        Cut loose two floors underground, the barrage would be at most a faint crackle at street level.
        Splinters of the old oak refectory table sprayed and scraps of paper spun and a couple bullets ricocheted through the air, some fragments trailing threads of smoke. The fragrance of aging newsprint was seasoned with the more acrid scent of gunfire and with a raw wood smell liberated from the table's wounds.
        For a moment, as he repeatedly squeezed the trigger without effect, I rejoiced that he had depleted his ammunition. But of course he had a spare magazine, perhaps several.
        While he reloaded the weapon, he seemed intent on delivering ten more rounds to the hated newspaper. Instead, with the fresh magazine installed, his rage abruptly abated. He began to weep. Wretched sobs racked him.
        He collapsed into his chair once more and put down the gun. He leaned over the table and seemed to want to piece together the pages that he had ripped and riddled with gunfire, as if some story therein was precious to him.
        Still lemony enough to sweeten the air that had been soured by gunfire, Lorrie Lynn Hicks tilted her head toward me and whispered, "You see?
        He's vulnerable."
        I wondered if excessive optimism could ever qualify as a form of madness.
        Gazing into her eyes, I saw, as previously, the fear that she adamantly refused to express. She winked.
        Her stubborn resistance to terror scared me because it seemed so reckless, so irrational-and yet I loved her for it.
        Whidding through me, like the spirit of Death's black horse, came a premonition that she would be shot. Despair followed this dark precognitive flash, and I was desperate to protect her.
        In time, the premonition eventually proved true, and nothing I did was able to alter the trajectory of the bullet.
        Tears damp on his cheeks, green eyes washed clear of bitter emotions, and clear of doubts as well, the maniac had the look of a pilgrim who has been to the mountaintop and knows his destiny, his purpose.
        He freed me and Lorrie from the chairs but left us tethered to each other.
        "Are you both locals?" he asked as we rose to our feet.
        After his violent display and flamboyant emotional outburst, I found it difficult to believe that he now wished to engage in pleasant chitchat.
        The question had a purpose more important than the