The redhead had one of her own stakes buried in her thigh. Good girl, Justine. It had hit the femoral artery, and even before I landed on her she was slipping to her knees. I had to take hold of the sword lest it tilt and make the wound worse—at which point I perceived it had gone all the way through my girl and deep into the walnut floor.

“Keep still,” I said to her. I pulled the stake from the redhead’s leg—her pale green eyes had closed, she didn’t make a sound—and drove it hard and fast through her sternum into her heart. Her mouth opened and I got a glimpse of her shrimp-pink tongue and one charmingly overlapping tooth. Then she was gone. The room was soupy with death. I imagined Sylvia Plath witnessing it all through the portal of The Colossus and not being the least surprised. Ted Hughes, on the other hand, for all his hawks and foxes and crows, would be agog.

“Do it,” Justine said, when I looked at her. Life was faint in her face. Wrists and neck and groin spoke of an equivocal pulse.

“I can get you to a hospital.”

“I want you to do it.”

I looked at the amount of blood she’d lost. There was no way of knowing. The air between us jammed with all the dialogue we didn’t have time for.

“I want you to,” Justine said, then her face twisted in pain. When it went back to normal she looked at me again. “I mean it, Fluff,” she said.

“It might not work.”

And it might kill me, I didn’t add. But the momentum was established. The alternative future—of ambulances and doctors and elaborate false testimony and separation and possible flight—dissolved in both of us with the mental equivalent of a sigh. We let it. We’d always known this time would come, and here it was. She’d had ten years of self-debate; now chance had forced the issue. It’s what chance is for. As with all such surrenders, it was a relief.

Which is not to say she wasn’t afraid. I felt her fear. She was leaving behind the biggest thing she had. She was going into the darkness. This was what she’d been thinking of, all alone in Las Rosas, for almost two years.

“Promise me you won’t leave me.”

“I won’t leave you, angel.”

“Promise.”

“I promise I won’t leave you.”

The room bore witness. The world registers promises.

“Are you ready?” I asked her.

She said, “Please,” and turned her face away, the way people do before the needle goes in.

I took one last look at her, the person she would never be again.

Then I pulled the sword out of her in one quick motion and began to drink.

8

IT WAS VERY bad. As bad as I thought it would be. Less than a quarter of the way through draining her the over-oxygenation started. Blood packed, hardened, became a warning throb: Stop drinking. Stop drinking. Stop drinking. Yet there was nothing to do but keep drinking, keep increasing the pain, keep bearing it. My eyeballs were big. I thought: warm hardboiled eggs. I had these thoughts. A capillary tearing. A soft inner explosion. Blood suffocated by blood. You can’t do this. You can’t do this. Stop drinking. Stop now. You can’t go on, so you go on. I thought of Paul Newman’s egg-eating scene in Cool Hand Luke, George Kennedy squeezing them past his lips, saying, them’s little eggs, quail’s eggs, really … Eggs again. Symbol of the soul … Or you do the Hemingway thing, promise yourself you’ll hold on for just one more second, then one more, then one more—and the seconds become hours, days. Like that, I thought, just do that, one more suck, one more swallow. Trick your own courage, your own cowardice. The Old Man and the Blood.

I saw what I didn’t want to see. The girl of five or six, her face too warm. The low-ceilinged room with a knocked-over table lamp throwing a stretched ellipse on a stained wall. The woman and the men like dark giants to her. Mommy, I don’t like it. The men’s massed concentration, their intent. The child’s world contained these fun-house distentions and drops that were the opposite of fun, these invisible mirrors that turned people into monsters. Her mother’s face was moist, with a look sometimes of frowning irritation, sometimes of giddy disbelief. In herself. In being able to do this. One of the men said, Come here. There was always thereafter a man saying, Come here. I saw what I didn’t want to see. The young girl, the teenager, the young woman, the religion of self-hatred, the men, always and deliberately the wrong men. The endlessly renewable contract with her own brokenness. The deep reassurance of their contempt. You like that, don’t you? Tell me you like it, you little cunt. I like it. Easier to say the more it was a lie. A pure inversion she could hold on to like a talisman.

But the destruction wasn’t complete. There were bright fragments. I saw her standing alone on the edge of a wood in falling snow, face upturned for the sacramental flakes. I saw her sitting in an apartment, hands wrapped around a mug of hot tea, at something like peace, maybe just a break in her identity, an accidental transcendence. I saw her opening a front door suddenly and unintentionally giving the FedEx girl a fright, and the two of them laughing. Laughter was absent from her life. Unless strategic or issued in triumph at some further depth she’d managed to go down to. I saw her seeing a bare tree against the sky and thinking, That’s like the cross-section of a lung … trees give oxygen, lungs need oxygen, a connection … But the thought overtaken by her habitual self, whose job it was to piss on such thoughts. I saw her seeing me in the freezing lot and, after a brief intuitive stumble and leap, knowing what I was. I saw her set down one by one the invisible burnings she carried and walk towards me. Inflamed. Scarred. Too far past everything to be afraid …

I couldn’t go on.

I went on.

Muhammad Ali said the third fight with Frazier in Manila was the closest he’d come to death. The closest he believed it was possible to come to death without dying. They call us the undead. It’s not true. We’re born. We live. We can die and so we can come close to death. I was close to death. The blood was a deafening totality. Like the scream of God. I wouldn’t be able to go on drinking. I would die.

I went on drinking.

Ten beats of the heart. Seven. Five. Four—

I tried to say to her, “Drink,” but there was no room in me for speech to come out of, no place words could have been kept. The blood was stone. I was stone. For a moment I went completely into darkness. I thought: Is this it? Is this death …? Then I came out. I opened my left wrist with the edge of the sword and pressed the wound to Justine’s lips.