Praying for Sleep

a dense bole of evil. Here, now, he filled the large greenhouse, expanding to touch every wall, the gravel floor, the peaked roof. He wiped rain from his eyes. “Lis-bone. Do you remember me?”
    “Please . . .” she whispered. The narcotic of fear flooded through her and stilled her voice.
    “I’ve traveled very far, Lis-bone. I fooled them all. I fooled them pretty good. Make no mistake.”
    She stepped back several feet.
    “You told them I killed that man. R-O-B-E-R-T. Six letters in his name. You lied. . . .”
    “Don’t hurt me. Please.”
    A fierce growling came from the hound, who was standing tall and tense behind Michael. The flesh of the dog’s mouth was drawn back from his ardent yellow teeth. Michael looked down and reached for him as if the dog were a stuffed toy. The hound dodged the hand and sank its teeth into Michael’s swollen left forearm. Lis thought he’d scream in agony but the huge man seemed not to feel the bite at all. He lifted the dog by its teeth and dragged him to a large storage closet. He pulled the slavering jaw from his arm and threw the animal inside, slamming the door.
    Oblivious to the gleaming razor-sharp knife in her hand Michael turned to Lis. Why bother? He can’t feel pain, he’s huge, he has a gun. . . . Still, she held the knife firmly in her hand and it was pointed directly at his heart.
    “Lis-bone. You were in court. You were part of that betrayal.”
    “I had to be in court. I had no choice. They make you be a witness. You understand that, don’t you? I didn’t mean you any harm.”
    “Harm?” He sounded exasperated. “Harm? There’s harm all around you! How could you miss it? The fuckers are everywhere!”
    Trying to stall him she said sympathetically, “You must be tired.”
    Ignoring this he said, “I have to tell you something. Before we get down to it.”
    Down to it.
    A chill ran from her neck to her thighs.
    “Now listen carefully. I can’t speak loudly because this room is sure to be bugged. You may know that as sur veil lance, where they watch you from behind veils or masks or TV screens. Are you listening ? Good.”
    He began a lecture, frantic yet passionless. “Justice cures betrayal,” he said. “I killed someone. I admit it. It wasn’t a fashionable thing to do and I know now it wasn’t smart.” He squinted, as if trying to recall his text. “True, it was not what you think of as killing. But that doesn’t excuse me. It doesn’t excuse anybody. Anybody! ” He frowned and glanced at words written in red ink on his hand. They had bled, like old tattoos.
    The monologue continued, his subject betrayal and revenge, and he paced the greenhouse floor, occasionally turning his back on Lis. At one point she almost leapt forward and plunged the blade into his back. But he turned quickly, as if suspicious of her, and continued to speak.
    With its faint blue-green lights the room seemed far removed from this time and place. It reminded her of a scene from a book she’d read years ago, perhaps the first novel of her childhood. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It seemed, in her own numb dementia, that they stood not in a rural greenhouse but in a Victorian submarine and that she was an innocent harpooner, watching the mad captain rant while the dark ocean passed over and around them.
    Michael talked about cows and Christian Scientists and women who hid behind unfashionable hats. He mourned the loss of a beloved black car. Several times he mentioned a Dr. Anne and, scowling, a Dr. Richard. Was that, she wondered, Kohler?
    Then he wheeled toward her. “I wrote you a letter. And you never answered it.”
    “But you didn’t put a return address on it. And you didn’t sign it. How would I know who it was from?”
    “Nice try,” he snapped. “But you knew I sent it.”
    His eyes were so piercing she said at once, “I knew, yes. I’m sorry.”
    “ They kept you from writing, didn’t they?”
    “Well—”
    “The spirits. The con- spirat -ors.”
    She nodded and he rambled on. He seemed to think her given name had seven letters in it. This pleased him enormously and she was terrified that he’d find some correspondence or a bill that would reveal the extra letter and he’d kill her for this deceit.
    “And now it’s time,” he said solemnly, and Lis shivered again.
    He pulled his backpack off and set it beside him. Then he undid his overalls, pulling them down over his massive thighs. The fly of his boxer shorts parted