What I Loved

always struck me as convenient but fallacious, if only because I was born into a century that should have ended such talk for good. For me, the lamp became the sign not of the inhuman but of the all-too-human, the lapse or break that occurs in people when empathy is gone, when others aren't a part of us anymore but are turned into things. There is genuine irony in the fact that my empathy for Mark vanished at the moment when I understood that he had not a shred of that quality in himself.
    Violet and I both waited for something to happen, and while we waited, we worked. I wrote about Bill and then rewrote what I had written. Nothing I came up with was any good, but the quality of my thought and prose was secondary to the fact that I was able to continue doing it. Violet read at the studio. She often returned with headaches and sore eyes, and she coughed from all the cigarettes she had smoked. I started making sandwiches for her to take to the Bowery and asked her to promise that she would eat them. I believe that she did, because she didn't lose any more weight.
    Months passed, and Arthur had nothing new to report except that the D.A was still looking for something or someone to tighten his case. Violet and I spent most of that hot summer together. A little restaurant opened on Church Street, below Canal, and we would meet there for dinner two or three times a week. One night, a couple of minutes after she arrived, Violet left the table to go to the toilet and the waiter asked me if I'd like to order a drink for my wife. When Violet spent two weeks in Minnesota in July, I called her every day. At night I worried that she would fall fatally ill or that she might decide to stay in the Midwest and never come back. But when Violet returned, we went on living in a state of suspense, wondering if the case would ever come to an end. The newspapers had dropped the story. Mark had left Anya and was living with another girl, named Rita. He informed Violet that he was working in a flower shop and gave her the name of the place, but Violet never bothered to call and check on whether it was true or not. It didn't seem all that important.
    And then, in late August, a boy named Indigo West came forward. Like a deus ex machina, he dropped from heaven and freed Mark from suspicion. He claimed to have witnessed the murder through the hallway door in Giles's apartment. Apparently, Indigo was only one of many people who had keys to Giles's apartment He had arrived at about five o'clock in the morning and wandered into one of the bedrooms. He slept most of the next day and woke to the sound of glass breaking in the front room. When he went to see what was happening, he said that he saw Giles with an axe in one hand and a broken vase in the other, standing over Rafael, who had already lost an arm. A large plastic dropcloth lay on the floor and was covered with blood. According to Indigo, Rafael was tied up and his mouth was taped. If he wasn't dead, he was almost dead. Unseen and unheard by Giles, Indigo ran back to the bedroom and hid under the bed, where he threw up. He lay absolutely still for at least an hour. He said he heard Giles walking around, and once he heard him just outside the bedroom door. When the telephone rang, Giles answered it, and not long after that, he heard Giles talking to someone in the hallway and recognized the voice as Mark's. He distinctly overheard Mark say that he was hungry, but the rest of the conversation was too low for him to hear. When the door slammed and all noises stopped, he waited for several minutes, crawled out from under the bed, and ran out of the building. He said he went to Puffy's and ordered a coffee from a waitress with blue hair.
    Indigo was a seventeen-year-old heroin addict, but Arthur said that he repeated his story without variation over and over again, and although the police hadn't found a single blood stain in Giles's apartment, they had noted a stain on the carpet under the bed where Indigo had spent the night, and the waitress at Puffy's, who had had blue hair at the time, remembered him. She had noticed him particularly because he had been shaking and crying over his espresso. When confronted with Indigo West, Teddy Giles accepted a plea bargain. The charges against him were reduced to aggravated manslaughter and he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Indigo West had been given immunity for his testimony, and neither he nor Mark was charged with anything. For a week the