Chapter 12
September 21
Rush Service
And out of what one sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves . . .Wallace Stevens, “Esthétique du Mal”
I AWOKE before the alarm went off, got up immediately, pulled some sweat togs on, and went directly to my workroom without any coffee, drawn by the guilty pleasure of working on Murder While You Wait. This was a real escape from my life, more effective as an escape than my past had ever been. Rockwell Kingman was nothing like me. I was beginning to spend more and more of my mental time with him, and I was beginning to like him. Already, I felt as if I had known him for years, and of course I must have. Consider this: I had understood his style from the moment when I first saw him standing at the window of that lousy hotel, waiting for the right set of circumstances to detonate his charge. His signature technique was misdirection: he made the target look like one of the innocent bystanders. If he executed a job perfectly, it looked sloppy. The intended death looked accidental, part of the mess left by a guy who couldn’t shoot straight, who couldn’t kill without overkill. I admired this deviousness. It seemed clever to me. The astonishing fact of his suddenly appearing at that hotel window — full-grown, tough, competent, cynical, bitter, brutal — no longer astonished me at all, because I knew exactly where he had come from, from some dark corner of myself, where he had been waiting for years, confident that the day would come when I would let him out.
“I CALLED LIZA,” Albertine said from her spot behind the desk, without looking up from the papers she was working on. When I didn’t say anything, she looked up and said, “The realtor who brought Mr. Fillmore out here?”
“I know,” I said. “I was just waiting to hear what she had to say.”
“Oh. Well, she said that our problem is that this is an island. People don’t like the idea of being stuck on an island.”
“That bothered Fillmore?” I asked.
“I guess so,” she said. She shrugged. I am ashamed to say that I thought she might be lying. I thought that she might be using Fillmore as her dummy to say to me the things she couldn’t bring herself to say to me directly — that she hated being stuck on an island and that she wished she had never followed me here. We stood there for a moment looking into each other’s eyes, and I couldn’t tell whether she was making that kind of disguised declaration or not. I thought of calling Liza to find out for myself. I could invent some pretext. I could say that I was interested in talking to Fillmore about a book I was working on. He would probably have some useful information for Murder While You Wait . . . and it was right about there that I began to wonder whether I was going nuts.
“They’re not making madmen the way they used to,” I said.
[to be continued]
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