From Part I--"here":
For the last several months I’d avoided the company of others. After Julia had left, I receded from the world around me. I kept to my room, or spent hours walking at night when no one was about. I voiced my thoughts, of course, but only to myself.
“But what about our murderer?” Gerald suddenly questioned, and I jumped in my chair, startled by the sudden sound of his voice.
“What about him?” I responded.
“Well,” Gerald continued, “is he your individual?”
“I suppose he might be, yes.”
“And you’ll maintain that his actions are not unjust,” Gerald constructed thoughtfully, “but of such a different category as to implore us to not judge them, but to understand them so fully as to assume his actions as our own?”
“If there is to be what you call justice,” I answered, “then no man’s actions can be treated as separate from our own.”
“But what of his victim?” Gerald asked immediately.
“There is a victim only so long as there is a murderer,” I replied.
“You have now utterly lost me,” Gerald confessed.
“We have a murderer and a victim,” I began, “because we have individuality, because we’ve taken it upon ourselves to perceive others as separate from ourselves. If we could unchain ourselves from the concept of individuality then we would not see a murder or a victim, but an event, an event that is as much a part of me as it is a part of you. But our indulgence in the concept of individuality means we judge events as occurring outside of our own parameters of self.”
“But without judgment,” Gerald interjected, “we could not make reasonable, logical decisions. We would have no control over our actions at all.”
“I don’t see that we do have such a control now,” I said.
“But you yourself have just defined individuality as control over action,” Gerald heatedly retorted.
“Did I say that individuality amounts to control over action?” I asked. “Or did I suggest that there’s a certain belief in man that allows him to perceive himself as an individual?”
“I don’t see a difference,” Gerald said coyly.
“But the difference is paramount,” I said, gesturing with my hands. “If individuality is only a concept, then your justice is, has been and always will be present. We just, if you will, do not perceive it.”
Just then the door to the cafe burst open and a young man came running in, shouting: “Sir Gerald, come quick, we’ve an eyewitness. We’ve a man who saw the murderer.”
From Part II--"there":
The immediacy of the moment grabs at Pigeon. He becomes ruthlessly aware of standing in the middle of the street clothed only in a short-sleeved shirt and underwear. A car lumbers past, on the street, and honks its horn twice. Pigeon reactively turns to look. From within the car’s concealment three faces stare back at him and mouth words to one another. I’m like a creature in a zoo, Pigeon thinks.
He turns dull-heartedly and walks back towards his apartment. But upon turning the corner, onto the street his building bleeds its populace onto, he’s overtaken by a harsh realization. This is where I live, he thinks. On a street that’s like a cement hallway, in a building that’s more like a storage-house, and in an apartment that’s really only a prelude to cardboard mansions and shopping-cart transiency. I am the squalid, he thinks to himself. His back slouches. His body bends from the mental weight of failure.
The hard-edged need to truthfully confront the reality of his circumstances holds him still on the cracked sidewalk. His arms dangle at his sides. His breathing becomes shallow, then even more shallow. It seems almost to anticipate its own disappearance.
What do I see? he asks himself. But what do I really see?
It is a sick kind of question. And somewhere inside of himself Pigeon knows it. He knows the question is shoveling a grave: His grave. But if he does not ask it he fears that someone else will. That someone will ask it of him, and with the implication that he is so in need of help that in order to simply keep breathing he has denied the fact, denied the reality, of his situation, and in its place erected, in his mind, an anesthetic fiction. He fears his failure has become so overt, so advert, so noticeable, that even strangers can see it. And perceiving no chance, no way of diverting his failure, Pigeon looks to escape the weight of it, the demoralizing and degrading pain of it by recognizing it more fully, more thoroughly, more actually. Someone may notice his poverty, but if he himself has begun to see the decay of his spirit, the cracking of his mind, the fermentation of his soul – then he will at least, though morbidly, have a place to hide. Someone will surely recognize that he’s failed at life, but he’ll already know he’s failed existence. He’ll be known, yes, but not locatable. He’ll be seen as a failure, yes. But where someone might still believe hope to exist, he’ll already have laid tombstones. And if he can keep tricking them, keep finding a deeper and darker place of failure in which to linger, in which to dwell, in which to hide, then he will have at the very least escaped the punishing reality of being found.
From Part III--"nowhere":
A pounding at the door. Has it been for three days? The houseplant and its paper-brown leaves. Like ash, or dead skin, they fall without warning. Under releases his grip on the chair and moves through the room. Heavy wood doors on well-waxed runners slide open. The cool hall air hits him like water. He takes a breath and it pulls his eyes back. Walking. His hands through his hair like preparation. Past the bathroom. A closet. Towards the front door. And the sound of his voice angry as his left hand slips the bolt and his right turns the knob.
Don’t try to pin your guilt on….
A young woman’s face. Not Bicky. A young woman’s face taken aback in soft blonde hair. Not Bicky. Sea-blue eyes, and the subtle longing for a man who’s really a boat that’s cast himself away. It’s not Bicky. Her lips poised parted with anticipation gone now paralyzed from confusion. Do i know you? Are you a stranger? What do you want? Under tightens his brow. The woman breathes. Under stares. Under waits. The woman smiles. A nervous gesture. Then he lets his arm close the door.
—Are you Edward Under?
Stop. The door half shut. Under’s eyes on her like a threat, like a paranoiac accusation, like abstract worry revealing, like accidental confessions, the man’s fear of being known.
—You don’t know me.
Her fingers long and thin. Not much flesh between their skin and bones. A woman’s hands. But still capable. Their strength dressed in softness.
—They gave me your name at the hospital.
Say nothing.
—I don’t mean to intrude. I just wanted to thank you.
Grey wool slacks.
—The man you helped is my grandfather.
Her breasts close enough to touch. I can smell her skin – the clean scent of lilacs and hand soap. Under swallows and grinds his hand behind the door.
—What you did was very kind.
What i did was done out of guilt. Your grandfather is nothing more than a man to me. I did not help him for his sake, but to escape the naggings of my own conscience.
—A kind conscience.
There’s nothing kind about it. I avoid what plagues me, that’s all.
—And what doesn’t plague you...?
They should not have given you my name at the hospital.
—I insisted.
You should not have come here.
—But i did.
You had no right.
—To meet the man who saved my grandfather’s life? I believe i have that right.
Across and down the hall a door is unlocked from the inside. #42. Donald. Soft, feathered hair. Clothes to accent a masculine frame. Clothes to hide pasty, fat skin. Intrusive eyes. And a mouth that loves money.
Good-bye.
Alexandria stands shirked and chagrin outside Under’s door.