He needs to be Martin Stillwater, which means he needs to write.
The man. The man was. The man was tall with blue eyes and blond hair, wearing a blue suit and white shirt and red tie, about thirty years old, and he didn’t know what he was doing in the room that he entered. Damn. No good. The man. The man. The man . . .
He needs to write, but every attempt to do so leads quickly to frustration. Frustration soon spawns anger. The familiar pattern. Anger generates a specific hatred for the computer, a loathing of it, and also a less focused hatred of his unsatisfactory position in the world, of the world itself and every one of its inhabitants. He needs so little, so pathetically little, just to belong, to be like other people, to have a home and a family, to have a purpose that he understands. Is that so much? Is it? He does not want to be rich, rub elbows with the high and mighty, dine with socialites. He is not asking for fame. After much struggle, confusion, and loneliness, he now has a home and wife and two children, a sense of direction, a destiny, but he feels it slipping away from him, through his fingers. He needs to be Martin Stillwater, but in order to be Martin Stillwater, he needs to be able to write, and he can’t write, can’t write, damn it all, can’t write. He knows the street layout of Kansas City, other cities, and he knows all about weaponry, about picking locks, because they seeded that knowledge in him—whoever “they” are—but they haven’t seen fit also to implant the knowledge of how to write mystery novels, which he needs, oh so desperately needs, if he is ever to be Martin Stillwater, if he is to keep his lovely wife, Paige, and his daughters and his new destiny, which is slipping, slipping, slipping through his fingers, his one chance at happiness swiftly evaporating, because they are against him, all of them, the whole world, set against him, determined to keep him alone and confused. And why? Why? He hates them and their schemes and their faceless power, despises them and their machines with such bitter intensity that—
—with a shriek of rage, he slams his fist through the dark screen of the computer, striking out at his own fierce reflection almost as much as at the machine and all that it represents. The sound of shattering glass is loud in the silent house, and the vacuum inside the monitor pops simultaneously with a brief hiss of invading air.
He withdraws his hand from the ruins even as fragments of glass are still clinking onto the keyboard, and he stares at his bright blood. Sharp slivers bristle from the webs between his fingers and from a couple of knuckles. An elliptical shard is embedded in the meat of his palm.
Although he is still angry, he is gradually regaining control of himself. Violence sometimes soothes.
He swivels the chair away from the computer to face the opposite side of the U-shaped work area, where he leans forward to examine his wounds in the light of the stained-glass lamp. The glass thorns in his flesh sparkle like jewels.
He is experiencing only mild pain, and he knows it will soon pass. He is tough and resilient; he enjoys splendid recuperative powers.
Some of the fragments of the screen have not pierced his hand deeply, and he is able to pry them out with his fingernails. But others are firmly wedged in the flesh.
He pushes the chair away from the desk, gets to his feet, and heads for the master bathroom. He will need tweezers to extract the more stubborn splinters.
Although he bled freely at first, already the flow is subsiding. Nevertheless he holds his arm in the air, his hand straight up, so the blood will trickle down his wrist and under the sleeve of his shirt rather than drip on the carpet.
After he has plucked out the glass, perhaps he will telephone Paige at work again.
He was so excited when he found her office number on the Rolodex in his study, and he was thrilled to speak with her. She sounded intelligent, self-assured, gentle. Her voice had a slightly throaty timbre that he found sexy.
It will be a wonderful bonus if she is sexy. Tonight, they will share a bed. He will take her more than once. Recalling the face in the photograph and the husky voice on the phone, he is confident that she will satisfy his needs as they have never been satisfied before, that she will not leave him unfulfilled and frustrated as have so many other women.
He hopes she matches or exceeds his expectations. He hopes there will be no reason to hurt her.
In the master bathroom, he locates a pair of tweezers in the drawer where Paige keeps her makeup, cuticle scissors, nail files, emery boards, and other grooming aids.
At the sink, he holds his hand over the basin. Although he has already stopped bleeding, the flow starts again at each point from which he works loose a piece of glass. He turns on the hot water so the dripping blood will be sluiced down the drain.
Maybe tonight, after sex, he will talk with Paige about his writer’s block. If he has been blocked before, she might remember what steps he took on other occasions to break the creative impasse. Indeed, he is sure she will know the solution.
Pleasantly surprised and with a sense of relief, he realizes that he no longer has to deal with his problems alone. As a married man, he has a devoted partner with whom to share the many troubles of the day.
Raising his head, looking at his reflection in the mirror behind the sink, he grins and says, “I have a wife now.”
He notices a spot of blood on his right cheek, another on the side of his nose.
Laughing softly, he says, “You’re such a slob, Marty. You’ve got to clean up your act. You have a wife now. Wives like their husbands to be neat.”
He returns his attention to his hand and, with the tweezers, picks at the last of the prickling glass.
In an increasingly good mood, he laughs again and says, “Gonna have to go out and buy a new computer monitor first thing tomorrow.”
He shakes his head, amazed by his own childish behavior.
“You’re something else, Marty,” he says. “But I guess writers are supposed to be temperamental, huh?”
After easing the final splinter of glass from the web between two fingers, he puts down the tweezers and holds his wounded hand under the hot water.
“Can’t carry on like this anymore. Not anymore. You’ll scare the bejesus out of little Emily and Charlotte.”
He looks in the mirror again, shakes his head, grinning. “You nut,” he says to himself, as if speaking with affection to a friend whose foibles he finds charming. “What a nut.”
Life is good.
7
The leaden sky settled lower under its own weight. According to a radio report, rain would fall by dusk, ensuring rush-hour commuter jam-ups that would make Hell preferable to the San Diego Freeway.
Marty should have gone directly home from Guthridge’s office. He was close to finishing his current novel, and in the final throes of a story, he usually spent as much time as possible at work because distractions were ruinous to the narrative momentum.
Besides, he was uncharacteristically apprehensive about driving. When he thought back, he could account for the time minute by minute since he’d left the doctor and was sure he hadn’t called Paige while in a fugue behind the wheel of the Ford. Of course, a fugue victim had no memory of being afflicted, so even a meticulous reconstruction of the past hour might not reveal the truth. Researching One Dead Bishop, he’d learned of victims who traveled hundreds of miles and interacted with dozens of people while in a disassociative condition yet later could recall nothing they’d done. The danger wasn’t as grave as drunken driving . . . though operating a ton and a half of steel at high speed in an altered state of consciousness wasn’t smart.