One Cold Night

taking that first bite of the shiny apple there was no crisp biting sound, no sweet mist in the air; there was just the airlessness of this apartment with its obsession walls and the awful smell of something rotting.
    She glanced toward an open door that led into another room where presumably she would find a bedroom or a kitchen. Was that where the terrible smellwas coming from? She didn’t want to see anything else; but she had come all this way, and for what? She had come for the truth. She would look in the room, she decided; but after just two steps forward Officer Johnson cleared his throat. She looked at him, at the invisible tether that seemed to emanate from his kind eyes: Keep still; don’t touch; only look. She had promised to behave and so she would. She stopped in place, like a little girl caught in freeze-tag.
    She supposed she was lucky he had brought her up here at all.
    She supposed she was lucky that the other people here seemed willing to ignore her.
    She supposed she was lucky to know what Dave knew: to know this.
    But what exactly was this?
    Her gaze landed on an eight-by-ten glossy print of Lisa taped midway up the wall: She had been caught in a thoughtful moment, up close, revealing the slight forehead crease when she was deciding something. Her rainbow-striped fleece scarf fluffed up past her chin; the photo had to have been taken as far back as last winter, since it hadn’t gotten cold enough yet this year for scarves.
    Taped neatly beside that photo was one of Susan and Dave, taken from behind, two minuscule figures walking hand in hand on a summer evening in the direction of home. Susan remembered that night: She was wearing an orange-and-pink sundress and they were just leaving the factory where Dave had helped her unpack a large shipment of unsweetened chocolate from Denmark, five-pound slabs. Lisa was out at a friend’s and they had gone home to cook dinner, but instead had made love and ordered in. Looking at the clandestineglimpse of that innocent moment, Susan felt a rush of love for Dave; love, and confidence that he would find within himself the capacity to forgive her.
    Below and above were photos of Lisa, Dave and Susan, alone or together in varying combinations. The photos were all different sizes; some were black-and-white and some were color. Some of the subjects had been cut out and placed on a different background. Others were layered together on the wall like a collage. Susan felt a terrible mourning at the visual cacophony in which random moments of their lives had been spliced together and sliced apart.
    How long had he been watching them?
    Then her eyes landed on the newspaper article about Dave, with Susan pictured along with her teenage sister, Lisa, the couple’s new roommate. So that was how Peter had found them. Below the article, a chilling message had been written directly on the wall: I am slain in the spirit.
    So that was it; that was the meaning of the letter. It was how the true evangelicals thought back home: When you married, you absorbed each other’s spirits into your own; you lived together and you lived in service to the Lord.
    Peter had once told her that he loved her almost as much as he loved God and that he knew exactly what he wanted from both of them. In her innocence she had been so thrilled by the sentiment that she didn’t ask him what exactly it was that he wanted.
    She felt the churning in her stomach again. The smell in the apartment seemed to heighten. She stopped breathing and held still. The room began to spin. The sensation reminded her of something, and then she realized what. When she was a little girl, sheused to stand in the middle of the old metal merry-goround, ordering her mother to push, push, so she could relish the dizzy imbalance of the ride. How had she ever enjoyed that sickening blur? Then she understood that she had never liked the dizzying aspect of it but the sensation of power it gave her. She had prided herself on never falling off. She had held on stoically, pretending to be the center axis of the ride, and that image had kept her steady.
    Like it or not, she was the center axis of this ride, too; she reminded herself of that. She would look at the rest of the photographs, every single one. There could be something here that no one else would recognize.
    But before she could resume looking, before the dizziness fully subsided, she remembered something else. Something completely different and until now