Walk on the Wild Side

Lost Exits



Every morning she would wake him with a kiss and a sleepy vow, “I love you,” and he would smile and echo, “I love you,” and he never saw the hatred behind her eyes.

Mercedes O’Brien slipped her feet into blue pumps, smoothed her skirt, and stepped up to the cheval glass to give final inspection to her mascara. She adjusted the bow at the throat of her silk blouse, fussed with the lapels of her business suit, and agreed with herself that muted blues enlivened the greys without softening the crisp projection of competence.

She was long-legged, her figure drew second and third looks, and at 30 she could still wear clothes she’d worn at 20. Her hair was bright and black and coiffured atop her head. She had a straight nose which she thought too large, full lips which she thought were rather sensual, and a firm jawline which she thought connoted determination. Her teeth were white and straight and strong. Most of all she approved of her eyes, which were dark and flashing and a mask.

She trusted mirrors, distrusted windows—agoraphobia, one therapist had said—and once she had lost control when she sensed another presence beyond the two-way mirror of a boutique dressing room.

Sean O’Brien had struggled into an old pair of blue jeans and was frying bacon when Mercedes strode into the kitchen. She heard him cuss as hot grease spat onto his bare belly.

“I'll just have juice and toast,” she told him. I'm in a rush. Big presentation.”

“Then you’d better stoke up.”

“May run late.”

“All the more reason.”

He was half a head taller than she and maybe had gained a pound for each of the ten years of their marriage. Back then he was strung out on crystal meth, and he could still gain ten pounds without showing love handles. Friends attributed it to good diet, exercise, and a loving wife.

They had met at the Filmore when he was opening before Cactus. She was an aspiring groupie. He was lead singer for Broken Bridges. He wrote most of their material himself, and they had great hopes for their first album. All they needed was a break— and maybe a little polish.

She knew from the start that he was singing to her. She told him so backstage, and at the motel, and the next morning. She would still tell him so after a dozen years and as many faded dreams.

Their marriage had been orchestrated with the release of the first album of his then-current group, Clouded Skies. While neither marriage nor album had generated the anticipated attention, the marriage endured—to the wonder and envy of all who knew them.

Sean O’Brien had been born in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, claimed second- or fourth-generation Irish descent, had never visited that island, but refused to change his name to something trendier. He had rust-colored hair, which he sometimes allowed to be cut in the prevailing style—but he would make no further concessions. His eyes were green, his temper was moody, and his face was neither pretty nor sneering. His voice was very good, but he lacked the charisma of a successful lead singer. His songs were very good, but his guitar could only be called “bad” in the original sense of the word.

Sean had managed half a dozen albums with half a dozen groups on half a dozen labels. Sean had not found fame, but he was not entirely forgotten, and some of his crib-death albums now sold for more than he’d eventually been paid to record them.

This did not pay the bills. To cover the dry spells, Mercedes had found a part-time job as receptionist for one of Sean’s disappointed record companies, whose junior vice-president they had met at a party. When Mercedes became executive secretary, Sean simply felt pride that her organizational skills had compensated for her inability to type.

She was his muse, an inspiration to him, a reason to fight on against all odds. She understood his artistic frustrations, believed in the validity of his work, proudly protected him from slings and arrows. He loved her. She loved him. All else was secondary and transient.

Sean was pouring orange juice.

Mercedes was executive assistant to the junior-most partner of Arrow Records Productions.

“One O.J..”

“Thank you.”

“Toast on its way.”

Standing, she sipped her juice.

He popped out the toast and buttered it for her. “Take your vitamins?”

“Of course. Did you?”

“Soon as I’ve had my morning workout.”

“I want you to stay healthy,” she said with real concern.

“Count on it.”

She bit her toast with lips drawn back, not to muss them. “I said I’d be late.”

Sean was having vodka with his orange juice. “Probably be late myself Got to see some people. Maybe we can do a late dinner around St Mark’s Place tonight.”

“You buying, or just carrying the Mace?”

“Cockroaches aren’t that big. Not at Nero’s, anyway”

“I’m not going in there again.”

“You name the place. Price no object. We’ll get a cab.”

Mercedes eyed him over her toast. “So what are you trying to tell me?”

Sean sipped his screwdriver. “Phone call before you got in last night. Nicki’s putting something together. Something big. They want to talk about it, and I said, ‘Maybe, if the money’s right,’ and Nicki said, ‘It’s right, my man.’ So, we’ll talk.”

Mercedes lunged to hug him. Toast crumbs and lipstick smeared his mouth. “Do you think...?”

Sean was nonchalant. “Nicki owes me. I’ve written some f*cking good stuff since that mess with Nuked Mutants. We’ll see.”

“I know you can do it. I’ve always known it.”

“Hey, wait till we sign!”

She gave him a long kiss, then released him. “I got to run.”

“Hey, let’s both be late to work.”

“Celebrate after.” She blew him another kiss. “Good luck—and I love you.”

“Love you too, Mercy. Don’t be too late.”

“He’s got so much talent,” Mercedes explained to three of her subordinates around the coffee urn. “He just won’t compromise. That’s what’s held him back.”

“Well, I think it’s just wonderful that you’ve stood by him for so long,” said one. “So many couples these days...”

“It isn’t easy,” Mercedes confessed. “Rock stars—well, you know...”

They nodded, waiting to know more.

“Drugs and booze,” confided Mercedes. “Wild parties in hotels. Teenaged groupies. All that backstage sort.”

“And you put up with Sean despite all this?”

“I have to—because I love him,” Mercedes said tragically. “I know what he does, and I don’t care.”

“That’s life in the fast lane, for sure,” said someone, as Mercedes returned to her office. “Sort of makes you wonder.”

“She loves him,” concluded someone else. “That’s all that matters to her. Poor kid.”

Twice each week she took a long lunchbreak in order to see her latest therapist. Trafford knew about it, of course, and, of course, he approved. She kept it a secret from Sean.

Dr Ruckerman was a fiftyish and heavyset woman who looked as if she ought to be wearing tweeds and decimating grouse, but she favored pastel polyester pantsuits, and she was listening to Mercedes instead.

Mercedes shifted squeakily upon the leather chair, wishing for a mirror so she might evaluate her composure.

“It’s hard to say,” she said with difficulty, “but I hate him.”

She cast her eyes downward, almost blushing. She’d practiced. “I understand that it’s hard to say,” prompted Dr Ruckerman. “I also understand that you feel this need to express such feelings.”

“I love him, but he’s changed—changed from what I loved. He’s lost all ambition, given up his dreams. He’s a stranger to me now. Sometimes he frightens me.”

“Has he threatened you?”

“Several times—whenever he’s drunk.”

“Is that often?”

“Every night. He’s so typically Irish.”

“Have you tried to urge him to seek help?”

“That’s when he becomes abusive.”

“Does he have a job?”

“I support him. He used to perform in rock bands, but he never made it. I guess it was because of the drugs.”

Dr Ruckerman checked her watch and her notes. “I think next time we should talk less about him and more about you.”

Nicki opened another bottle of French champagne and started to pour. “Sean—where’s your glass?”

“Two’s my limit tonight,” Sean begged off. “I got to get home to the wife and kids.”

“Shit! You and Mercy got kids?”

“Soon, I hope. We’re working on it. But she’s expecting me. Working late herself.”

The studio was crowded and just a bit sweaty, and the party was ready to break up. Billy Spree and entourage were trying to sort out limos, the media were finishing notes and caviar, and tomorrow an interested public would know that Billy Spree was reforming The Terminators with Sean O’Brien doing lead vocals. Billy Spree could raise the dead with his guitar, but there his genius ended, and by now even he knew it.

“Where’s she at? ” Nicki poured champagne onto his foot. “We’ll take a limo and go pick her up.”

“Got a presentation to finish. Mercy’s turned yuppie on us.”

“Shit.” Nicki missed his nose with his coke spoon, passed the phial to Sean. “That woman sure loves you. Can’t think of anybody else who’ve kept together so long. Been...?”

“Married for over ten.” Sean returned the phial.

“Oldest married couple on earth. What’s your secret?”

“Vitamin E.”

“Yeah? Really?”

“For sure. You squish the suckers open, and then you spread the oil...”

Mercedes wiped her cunt once more, then held some folded tissues there until she snugged the cotton-lined crotch of her panties securely in place. No wet seat on the cab ride back to the East Village.

Trafford remained sprawled across his office couch, watching her dress, smoking a cigarette, his cock limp upon his right thigh. “What’s the rush?”

“My husband, remember?”

“So what?”

“He’ll start to raise shit if I’m not back.”

“So what?”

“I told you what he’s like.” Mercedes fitted her breasts into her bra. “He’s a drunken jealous sadist.”

“Word is that you have a perfect marriage.”

“Whose word? Sean’s? I let him believe that. I have to. He’d hang me up by my thumbs if he thought I was in love with someone else. In love with you.”

Trafford sat up on the couch. “Hey, lover. Pull off that brassiere and come back here.”

He gripped her head and pushed her face onto his cock.

She readily accepted its familiar length deep into her throat. She could identify a dozen past and potential bosses purely by taste.

It was really getting late, and Mercedes was starting to feel anxious as the elevator descended from Trafford’s office. The door opened, and she strode briskly across the lobby, hoping for a quick cab. Not even Sean could always be so trusting, so dense.

As Mercedes pushed into the revolving door, she saw her reflection in the glass. Somehow something seemed wrong with her image there, and then she realized that she was not looking at her reflection, but at another person confined within the glass chambers of the revolving door.

Her twin gaped back at her as they spun past. There was a shock of panic, a feeling of vertigo, and then a sense of some wrenching, of deep tearing.

And Mercedes was through the door, stumbling across the sidewalk, frantically hailing the cab that waited there.

Mercedes lay back against the seat cushions, as the feeling Mercedes lay back against the seat cushions, as the feeling of lightheadedness began to fade. She really had been working

of lightheadedness began to fade. She really ought to cut-back

too hard lately, but the response to her presentation made

on the coke and ’ludes, but it helped to get her through the

all the hard work worthwhile. The senior staff were taking

living hell with Sean. A’t least Trafford was a good f*ck, and

note of her abilities, and there was a lot of talk of a major

office gossip indicated she could ride him to a senior vice-

promotion.

presidency.

Sean would be so proud of her, and she’d work even harder Sean

would be a problem, and it was time she left the drunken Irishman

to support their life together. Mercedes hoped his sessions

He was a washed-up loser; and Mercedes

with Nicki had gone OK. Sean was a genius, and it hurt her to

rejoiced with each predictable failure. She liked wielding

see his work ignored. Probably by now he was worried sick

the financial whip hand over him. Probably by now he was drunk

about her. At least he knew that she was faithful to him,

and passed out in his vomit. At least he never guessed that

just as she knew Sean was faithful to her.

she was flicking around, not that Sean could get it up anymore.

Mercedes was reaching for her key when Sean opened the Mer

cedes let herself into the apartment and found Sean

door—relief and excitement in his face. He held a dozen red

sprawled on the couch, his face bloated and angry. He had a

roses out to her, and he was kissing her while she tried to take them.

near-empty bottle of vodka in his fist, and he staggered toward her.

“Nicki came through!” Sean told her, trying to hug her

“Who you been f*cking tonight, you goddamn slut!” Sean and dance at the same time. “Billy Spree picked me for his

shouted, trying to hit her with the bottle. “I been waiting

new lead with The Terminators!”

here all night for some dinner!”

“Sean! I knew it’d happen!”

“Sean! Keep away from me!”

Mercedes sorted out purse, roses, and Sean—kissing the latter. Mercedes dodged the bottle, screaming at him.

“Keep your purse,” Sean said. “I’m taking us out on the town.” “You're gonna pay for f*cking around on me!” Sean yelled.

“Let’s just stay here,” Mercedes said.

“You drunken son of a bitch!” Mercedes shouted back.

Then they were together on the couch, laughing and kissing like Then he knocked her to the floor, where they wrestled and screamed like giggling teenagers, and the roses scattered a red pattern across the rug. animals, until Sean began to bash her face with the bottle, and a red pattern sprayed across the rug.





Endless Night



I runne to death, and death meets me as fast,

And all my pleasures are like yesterday.

—John Donne, Holy Sonnet I

The dream landscape always stretched out the same. It had become as familiar as the neighborhood yards of his childhood, as the condo-blighted streets of his middle years. Dreams had to have some basis in reality—or so his therapists had tried to reassure him. If this one did, it was of some unrecognized reality.

They stood upon the edge of the swamp, although somehow he understood that this had once been a river, and then a lake, as all became stagnant and began to sink. The bridge was a relic, stretched out before them to the island—on the far shore—beyond. It was a suspension bridge, from a period which he could not identify with certainty, but suspected was of the early 1930s judging by the Art Deco pylons. It seemed ludicrously narrow and wholly inappropriate for its task. As the waters had risen, or the land mass had sunk, its roadway, ridged and as gap-toothed as a railway trestle, had settled into the water’s surface—so that midway across one must slosh through ankle-deep water, feeling beneath the scum for the solid segments of roadway. Spanish moss festooned the fraying cables; green lichens fringed the greener verdigris of bronze faces staring out from the rotting concrete pylons. Inscriptions, no doubt explaining their importance, were blurred beyond legibility.

It was always a breathless relief to reach the upward-sloping paving of the far end, scramble toward the deserted shoreline beyond. His chest would be aching by then, as though the warm, damp air he tried to suck into his lungs were devoid of sustenance. There were ripples in the water, not caused by any current, and while he had never seen anything within the tepid depths, he knew it was essential not to linger in crossing.

His companion or guide—he sometimes thought of her as his muse—always seemed to know the way, so he followed her. Usually she was blonde. Her bangs obscured her eyes, and he only had an impression of her face in profile—thin, with straight nose and sharp chin. He sensed that her cheekbones would be pronounced, her eyes large and watchful and widely spaced. She was barefoot. Sometimes she tugged up her skirt to hold its hem above the water, more often she was wearing only a long T-shirt over what he assumed was a swimsuit. He realized that he knew her, but he could never remember her name.

He supposed he looked like himself. The waters gave back no reflection.

It—the building—dominated the shoreline beyond. From the other side he often thought of it as an office building, possibly some sort of apartment complex. He was certain then that he could see lights shining from its many-tiered windows. It appeared to have been constructed of some salmon-hued brick, or perhaps the color was another illusion of the declining sun. It was squat, as broad as its dozen-or-more stories of height, and so polyhedral as to seem almost round. Its architecture impressed him as featureless—stark walls and windows, Bauhaus utilitarian. Either its creator had lacked any imagination or else had sacrificed external form to unguessable function.

The features of the shoreline never impressed themselves upon his memory. There was a rising of land, vague blotches of trees, undergrowth. The road dragged slowly upward toward the building. Trees overhung from either side, reaching toward one another, garlanded with hanging vines and moss—darkening skies a leaden ribbon overhead. The pavement was cracked and broken—calling to mind orphaned segments of a WPA-era two-lane highway, bypassed alongside stretches of the interstate, left to decompose into the wounded earth. Its surface was swept clean. Not disused; rather, seldom used.

Perhaps too frequently used.

If there were other structures near the building, he never noticed them. Perhaps there were none; perhaps they were simply inconsequential in comparison. Sometimes he thought of an immense office building raised out of the wilderness of an industrial park or a vast stadium born of the leveled wasteland of urban renewal, left alone and alien in a region where the genius loci ultimately reconquered. A barren space, encroached upon by that which was beyond, surrounded the building—sometimes grass-latticed pavement (parking lot?), sometimes a scorched and eroded barrier of weeds (ground zero?).

Desolation, not wholly dead.

Abandoned, not entirely forgotten.

The lights in the windows, which he was certain he had seen from across the water, never shone as they entered.

There was a wire fence, sometimes: barbed wire leaning from its summit, or maybe insulated balls of brown ceramic nestling high-voltage lines. No matter. All was rusted, corroded, sagging like the skeletal remains that rotted at its base. When there was a fence at all.

If there was a fence, gaps pierced the wire barrier like the rotted lace of a corpse’s mantilla. Sometimes the gate lay in wreckage beneath its graffitied arch: Abandon Hope. Joy Through Work. War Is Peace. Ask Not.

My Honor Is Loyalty.

One of his dreams is a fantasy of Nazis.

He knows that they are Nazis because they are all wearing Jack boots and black uniforms, SS insignia and swastika armbands, monocles and Luger pistols. And there are men in slouch-brim hats and leather overcoats, all wearing thick glasses—Gestapo, they have to be. White-clad surgeons with button-up-the-back surplices, each one resembling Lionel Atwill, suck glowing fluids into improbable hypodermics, send tentative spurts pulsing from their needles.

Monocles and thick-lensed spectacles and glass-hard blue eyes peer downward. Their faces are distorted and hideous—as it he, or they, someone, is viewing this perspective through a magnifying glass. The men in black uniforms are goose-stepping and Heil-Hitlering in geometric patterns behind the grinning misshapen faces of the doctors.

The stairway is of endless black marble, polished to a mirror-sheen, giving back no reflection. The SS officers, alike as a thousand black-uniformed puppets, are goose-stepping in orderly, powerful ranks down the polished stairway. Toward them, up the stairway, a thousand blonde and blue-eyed Valkyries, sequin-pantied and brass-brassiered, flaxen locks bleached and bobbed and marcelled, are marching in rhythm—a Rockette chorus line of Lorelei.

Wir werden weiter marschieren,

wenn alles in Sherben fällt,

denn heute gehört uns Deutchland

und morgen die ganze Welt!

Needles plunge downward.

Inward.

Distancing.

Der Führer leans and peers inward. He wipes the needles with his tongue and snorts piggishly. Our final revenge, Hitler promises, in a language he seems to understand. The dancers merge upon the stairway, form a thousand black-and-white swastikas as they twist their flesh together into DNA coils.

Sieg Heil!

Someday A thousand bombs burn a thousand coupled moths into a thousand flames.

A thousand, less one.

Distance.

While he hated and feared all of his fantasies, he usually hated and feared this one worst of all. When he peered through the windows of the building, he saw rows of smokestacks belching uncounted souls into the recoiling sky.

But often there was no fence. Only a main entrance.

A Grand Entrance. Glass and aluminum and tile. Uncorroded, but obscured by thin dust. A receptionist’s desk. A lobby of precisely arranged furniture—art moderne or coldly functional—nonetheless serving no function in the sterile emptiness.

No one to greet him, to verify an appointment, to ask for plastic cards and indecipherable streams of numbers. He always thought of this as some sort of hospital, possibly abandoned in the panic of some unleashed plague virus.

He always avoided the lifts. (Shouldn’t he think of them as elevators?) Instead he followed her through the deserted (were they ever occupied?) hallways and up the hollow stairwell that gave back no echo to their steps.

There is another fantasy that he cannot will away.

He is conscious of his body in this fantasy, but no more able to control his body than to control his fantasy.

He is small—a child, he believes, looking at the boyish arms and legs that are restrained to the rails of the hospital bed, and examining the muted tenderness in the faces of the white-clad supplicants who insert the needles and apply the electrodes to his flesh.

Electric current makes a nova of his brain. Thoughts and memories scatter like a deck of cards thrown against the sudden wind. Drugs hold his raped flesh half-alert against the torture. Smoke-stacks spew forth a thousand dreams. All must be arranged in a New Order.

A thousand cards dance in changing patterns across his vision. Each card has a face, false as a waxen mask. His body strains against the leather cuffs; his scream is taken by a soggy wad of tape on a wooden paddle.

The cards are telling him something, something very essential. He does not have time to read their message.

I’m not a fortune-teller! he screams at the shifting patterns of cards. The wadded tape steals his protests.

The rape is over. They are wheeling him away The cards filter down from their enhanced freedom, falling like snowflakes in a dying dream.

And then he counts them all.

All are there. And in their former order.

Order must be maintained.

The Old Order is stronger.

But he knows—almost for certain—that he has never been a patient in any hospital. Ever.

His health is perfect. All too perfect.

She always led him through the maze within—upward, onward, forward. The Eternal Female/Feminine Spirit-Force. Goethe’s personal expression of the ultimate truth of human existence—describing a power that transcended and revoked an informed commitment to damnation—translated awkwardly into pretentious nonsense in English. He remembered that he had never read Goethe, could not understand a word of German.

His therapists said it was a reaction to his adoption in infancy as a German war orphan by an American family. The assertive and anonymous woman represented his natural mother, whom he had never known. But his birth certificate proved that he had been born to unexceptional middle-class American parents in Cleveland, Ohio.

And his memories of them were as faded and unreal as time-leached color slides. Memories fade before light, and into night.

False memories. Reality a sudden celluloid illusion.

Lightning rips the night.

Doctor! It’s alive!

Another fantasy evokes (or is invoked by, say his therapists) visions of Macbeth, of scary campfire stories, of old films scratched and eroded from too many showings. His (disremembered) parents (probably) only allowed him to partake of the first, but Shakespeare knew well the dark side of dreams.

Sometimes he is on a desolate stretch of moor, damp and furred with tangles of heather. (He supposes it is heather, remembering Macbeth.) Or perhaps he is on a high mountain, with barren rocks thrusting above dark forest. (He insists that he has never read Faust, but admits to having seen Fantasia.) Occasionally he stands naked within a circle of standing stones, huge beneath the empty sky. (He confesses to having read an article about Stonehenge.) And in this same Gothic context, he has another such fantasy, and he never speaks of its imperfectly remembered fragments to anyone—not to lovers, therapists, priests, or his other futile confidants.

It is, again (to generalize), a fantasy in which he is the observer. Passive, certainly. Helpless, to be sure. But the restraints hold a promise of power to be feared, of potential to be unleashed.

Hooded figures surround him, center upon his awareness. Their cloaks are sometimes dark and featureless, sometimes fantastically embroidered and colored. He never sees their faces.

He never sees himself, although he senses he stands naked and vulnerable before them.

He is there. In their midst. They see him.

It is all that matters.

They reach/search/take/give/violate/empower.

There is no word in English.

His therapists tell him this is a homosexual rape fantasy.

There is no word in any language.

There is only the power.

The stairway climbed inexorably as she led him upward into the building. Returning—and they always returned, he knew now—the descent would be far more intolerable, for he would have his thoughts to carry with him.

A stairwell door: very commonplace usually (a Hilton or a Hyatt?), but sometimes of iron-bound oak, or maybe no more than a curtain. No admonition. No advice. On your own. He would have welcomed Fire Exit Only or Please Knock.

She always opened the door—some atavistic urge of masculine courtesy always surfaced, but he was never fast enough or certain enough—and she held it for him, waiting and demanding.

Beyond, there was always the same corridor, circling and enclosing the building. If there was any significance to the level upon which they had emerged, it was unknown to him. She might know, but he never asked her. It terrified him that she might know.

There is innocence, if not guiltlessness, in randomness.

He decided to look upon the new reality beyond the darkened windows of the corridor. She was impatient, but she could not deny him this delay, this respite.

Outside the building he saw stretches of untilled farmland, curiously demarcated by wild hedgerows and stuttering walls of toppled stone. He moved to the next window and saw only a green expanse of pasture, its grassy limitlessness ridged by memories of ancient fields and villages.

He paused here, until she caught at his arm, pulled him away. The next window—only a glimpse—overlooked a city that he was given no time to recognize, had he been able to do so through the knowledge of the fire that consumed it.

There were doors along the other side of the corridor. He pretended that some might open upon empty apartments, that others led to vacant offices. Sometimes there were curtained recesses that suggested confessionals, perhaps secluding some agent of a higher power—although he had certainly never been a Catholic, and such religion that he recalled only underscored the futility of redemption.

She drew aside a curtain, beckoned him to enter.

He moved past her, took his seat.

Not a confessional. He had known that. He always knew where she would lead him.

The building was only a façade, changing as his memory decayed and fragmented, recognizing only one reality in a dream-state that had consumed its dreamer.

A stadium. A coliseum. An arena.

Whatever its external form, it inescapably remained unchanged in its function.

This time the building’s interior was a circular arena, dirt-floored and ringed by many tiers of wooden bleachers. The wooden benches were warped and weathered silver-gray. Any paint had long since peeled away, leaving splinters and rot. The building was only a shell, hollow as a whitened skull, encircled by derelict rows of twisted benches and sagging wooden scaffolding.

The seats were all empty. The seats had been empty, surely, for many years.

He sensed a lingering echo of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” played on a steam calliope. Before his time. Casey at the bat. This was Muddville. Years after. Still no joy.

He desperately wished for another reality, but he knew it would always end the same. The presentations might be random, might have some unknowable significance. What mattered was that he knew where he really was and why he was here.

Whether he wanted to be here was of no consequence.

She suggested, as always. The woman at the bank who wouldn’t approve the car loan. Send for her.

She was only doing her job.

But you hated her in that moment. And you remember that hatred.

Involuntarily, he thought of her.

The numberless windows of the building’s exterior pulsed with light.

A window opened.

Power, not light, sent through. And returned.

And the woman was in the arena. Huddled in the dirt, too confused to sense fear.

The unseen crowd murmured in anticipation.

He stared down at the woman, concentrating, channeling the power within his brain.

She screamed, as invisible flames consumed her being. Her scream was still an echo when her ashes drifted to the ground.

He looked for movement among the bleachers. Whatever watched from there remained hidden.

Another, she urged him.

He tried to think of those who had created him, this time to send for them. But the arena remained empty. Those he hated above all others were long beyond the vengeance of even his power.

Forget them. There are others.

But I don’t hate them.

If not now, then soon you will. There is an entire world to hate. And, he understood, too many nights to come.

Some are Born to sweet delight,

Some are Born to Endless Night.

—William Blake, Auguries of Innocence