He sensed this too, though he couldn’t phrase it to himself. He had envied me because I did not care about the things that were tormenting him. Because I wouldn’t have tortured myself as he had tortured himself to spare his wife’s feelings, to show her a strong face. I wouldn’t have endured the agony of behaving well. I would have screamed, I would have fought, I would have cried-so Frank believed. I wouldn’t have wracked my mind to find the message of God in this miserable, meaningless death. Nor would I have sought to please God, this God whose eye impassively watched him careening toward his own destruction. This God who would not intercede. I would not be submissive to that God, Frank thought, or sit here holy and quiescent and well-behaved before these guards and wardens and lawyers, these men who coolly attended the business of his murder, these bastards who had fucked with him all his life and were fucking him now right into the grave.
And which of us was better off, he asked himself, he or I?
He drank his beer. Almost in a spasm, his hand jerked up, tipping the cup at his lips. He took a long swallow and, once again, the taste conjured the aura of Sal’s Tavern in him: the dark wood of the bar, the colors of the bottles on the shelves, the smell of smoke and the sound of country music. The desolate relief.
He set the tumbler down on the table. He glanced up at the clock.
Which of us was better off? He wiped his raw lips with the back of his hand. Christ, he thought, there were men in this prison-there were men on the streets-who murdered children as they cried for their mothers, who raped and tortured women, or executed men with no more show of feeling than a dreamy smile-and they were better off than he was. They were not here. Some weren’t even condemned to come here. Some would live free men and die in the joy of their cruelties. And they wouldn’t care. As I didn’t care.
And what if …? thought Frank. And before the thought was finished, something happened to him. Something terrible, violent and illuminating. He felt it that way-it struck him almost as a physical fact.
It seemed, as he sat there, his hand around the paper tumbler of beer, that the eye of God above him winked out. Just for a second. It vanished. For a few seconds perhaps. But in those seconds, Frank felt its disappearance certainly. And he felt, at the same time, as if he had burst from dark water into open air. For those few seconds, he felt he saw things clearly. He saw that he was … here-how here-how incontrovertibly here. He was here alone, in this cage, in this insane predicament, with no one to witness him but self-interested men, with no other system to judge him but the one that had unfairly condemned him to die. There was no God to make his suffering good. There was no heaven to make it all come right. For these few seconds, the gleaming bars, the dull cinderblock walls, the clock with its red second hand in unceasing motion-they all took on a hard, glistering clarity-and they were here-how here they were-these bars, these walls, that clock-there was nothing else but these. These were the facts. These were the only facts of his life. These were the things that happened. And there were no other things.
In those seconds, he could see all this at once, altogether, as in a vision. And he could see more. He could see the things that would happen too. He could see that they would come for him. These guards, these men. For their daily bread, they would strap him down. They would pump the poison into his arm while he lay there helpless. And no God would be watching. No heaven would receive him. They would turn him off, like a light, entirely. And he would be gone. And his wife, his good Bonnie, she would not be better off, as he had told himself. They would not meet again, as he had told himself. She would be poor. She would be old before her time. She would shuffle through the world, accepting and baffled and sour. Frantically praising the Lord like a dizzy lunatic to keep from suspecting the truth that the Lord wasn’t there, that none of this mattered, that it was all in aid of nothing. And their daughter: She would find no peace. She would be scarred forever. She would keep her father alive in her bitterness only. Lacerated with rage, lacerating her children with her rage, and the uninterested world with her rage. And in the long run, of course, they would die-Bonnie and Gail, the two of them-they would die and leave it all to be forgotten except for the scars they had inflicted on others because of the scars that had been inflicted on them and on and on …
And it’s written in ink, thought Frank. Nothing will ever erase it. It’s all written in ink.
And then the vision was over. The seconds were at an end. The eye of God reopened above him. The whole mental event had barely risen to his consciousness before he experienced a spasm of revulsion-an opening inside him into a well of bottomless terror and grief-and in that spasm, the vision was forced down. His mind at once grew clamorous with his own exhortations. Hang on there, boy. You’re just losing it that’s all. Keep steady. Keep the faith. For Bonnie’s sake. For Gail. Don’t go out crazy. Hang on. Hang on.
But, of course, it was not the same as before. Once you have seen something, you can’t simply stop seeing it. The vision remained, buried though it was, smoldering beneath his self-encouragement with a blue-white fire of clarity and despair.
Frank Beachum raised his beer to his lips and his hand was shaking. He drank and set the tumbler down unsteadily. He stared at the table. He thought of his wife. How much, how much he had loved her …
He glanced up at the clock.
3
I have a superstition about disaster. Disaster, I believe, always takes you by surprise. It follows from this that if you can imagine every possible form that disaster might take, you’ll be protected. If you expect disaster, every possible kind of disaster, there’s no room for surprise, so disaster will stay away. This method has proved effective many times and the many times it has not proved effective I’ve blamed it on myself or mitigating circumstances and gone on believing it anyway. I put it into practice as I drove out to Knight Street to meet the man who had killed Amy Wilson.
Night had fallen now-or the long summer dusk, at least, with the crystal sky growing so dark, so deep above the low buildings of the county that it seemed you could almost taste the first stars waiting to break through. The edge was off the heat at last and with all the Tempo’s windows rolled down the air blew over me pleasantly, drying my shirt, drying my face, helping me breathe easily again. I stank-after the steambath of Michelle’s apartment-and a crust of grime seemed to cling to my skin. But the breeze felt fine and it eased my headache a little, even calmed my stomach, and began to clear my mind.
I drove past the brick cafes, the tree-lined sidewalks of the broad boulevard-of the same boulevard Michelle had been driving on that very morning before she crashed. With one part of my mind, I monitored the news station on the radio, listening for information about Frank Beachum. With the rest of my mind, I imagined possible scenarios of disaster in the hope that I might avoid surprise.
He would not be there, I told myself. That was the most likely prospect. Warren Russel-my prime suspect-would have moved away and left no forwarding address. Or no one would tell me where he was. Or he would be there and would refuse to talk to me. Or he would talk to me and, at my first pertinent question, would draw an AK-47 from his belt and stitch a seam of bullets from my forehead to my navel, sending me reeling down his front stoop to lie dead in the street below me. Then-and I added this just for the sake of drama-he would spit on my carcass and sneer before he slammed the door.