with dirt. Will I love it? Hell, he's a sack of blood. Why push my luck? I couldn't kill 
little children anymore, could I? Or feast on waterfront harlots, telling myself it's all 
perfectly fine, for they have poisoned their share of flat-boatmen. My conscience is 
killing me, isn't it? And when you're immortal that can be a really long and ignominious 
death. Yeah, look at him, this dirty, stinking, lumbering killer. Men in prison get 
better chow than this.
  
  And then it hit me as I scanned his mind once more as if cutting open a cantaloupe. He 
doesn't know what he is! He has never read his own headlines! And indeed he does not 
remember episodes of his life in any discerning order, and could not in truth confess to 
the murders he has committed for he does not truly recall them, and he does not know that 
he will kill tonight! He does not know what I know!
  
  Ah, sadness and grief, I had drawn the very worst card, no doubt about it. Oh, Lord 
God! What had I been thinking of to hunt this one, when the starlit world is full of more 
vicious and cunning beasts? I wanted to weep.
  
  But then came the provocative moment. He had seen the old woman, seen her bare wrinkled 
arms, the small hump of her back, her thin and shivering thighs beneath her pastel 
shorts. Through the glare of fluorescent light, she made her way idly, enjoying the buzz 
and throb of those around her, face half hidden beneath the green plastic of a visor, 
hair twisted with dark pins on the back of her small head.
  
  She carried in her little basket a pint of orange juice in a plastic bottle, and a pair 
of slippers so soft they were folded up into a neat little roll. And now to this she 
added, with obvious glee, a paperback novel from the rack, which she had read before, but 
fondled lovingly, dreaming of reading it again, like visiting with old acquaintances. A 
Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Yes, I loved it too.
  
  In a trance, he fell in behind her, so close that surely she felt his breath on her 
neck. Dull-eyed and stupid, he watched as she inched her way closer and closer to the 
register, drawing out a few dirty dollar bills from the sagging collar of her blouse.
  
  Out the doors they went, he with the listless plodding style of a dog after a bitch in 
heat, she making her way slowly with her gray sack drooping from its cut-out handles, 
veering broadly and awkwardly around the bands of noisy and brazen youngsters on the 
prowl. Is she talking to herself? Seems so. I didn't scan her, this little being walking 
faster and faster. I scanned the beast behind her, who was wholly unable to see her as 
the sum of her parts.
  
  Pallid, feeble faces flashed through his mind as he trailed behind her. He hungered to 
lie on top of old flesh; he hungered to put a hand over an old mouth.
  
  When she reached her small forlorn apartment building, made of crumbling chalk, it 
seemed, like everything else in this seedy section of town, and guarded by bruised 
palmettos, he came to a sudden swaying stop, watching mutely as she walked back the 
narrow tiled courtyard and up the dusty green cement steps. He noted the number of her 
painted door as she unlocked it, or rather he clamped on to the location, and sinking 
back against the wall, he began to dream very specifically of killing her, in a 
featureless and empty bedroom that seemed no more than a smear of color and light.
  
  Ah, look at him resting against the wall as if he had been stabbed, head lolling to one 
side. Impossible to be interested in him. Why don't I kill him now!
  
  But the moments ticked, and the night lost its twilight incandescence. The stars grew 
ever more brilliant. The breeze came and went.
  
  We waited.
  
  Through her eyes, I saw her parlour as if I could really see through walls and 
floors-clean, though filled with careless old furniture of ugly veneer, round-shouldered, 
unimportant to her. But all had been polished with a scented oil she loved. Neon light 
passed through the Dacron curtains, milky and cheerless as the view of the yard below. 
But she had the comforting glow of her small carefully positioned lamps. That was what 
mattered to her.
  
  In a maple rocking chair with hideous plaid upholstery, she sat composed, a tiny but 
dignified figure, open paperback novel hi hand. What happiness to be once more with 
Francie Nolan. Her thin knees were barely hidden now by the flowered cotton robe she had 
taken from her closet, and she wore the little blue slippers like socks over her small 
misshapen feet. She had made of her long gray hair one thick and graceful braid.
  
  On the small black-and-white television screen before her, dead movie stars argued 
without making a sound. Joan Fontaine thinks Gary Grant is trying to kill her. And 
judging by the expression on his face, it certainly did seem that way to me. How could 
anyone ever trust Gary Grant, I wondered-a man who looked as though he were made entirely 
of wood?
  
  She didn't need to hear their words; she had seen this movie, by her careful count, 
some thirteen times. She had read this novel in her lap only twice, and so it will be 
with very special pleasure that she revisits these paragraphs, which she does not know 
yet by heart.
  
  From the shadowy garden below, I discerned her neat and accepting concept of self, 
without drama and detached from the acknowledged bad taste that surrounded her. Her few 
treasures could be contained in any cabinet. The book and the lighted screen were more 
important to her than anything else she owned, and she was well aware of their 
spirituality. Even the color of her functional and styleless clothes was not worth her 
concern.
  
  My vagabond killer was near paralysis, his mind a riot of moments so personal they 
defied interpretation.
  
  I slipped around the little stucco building and found the stairs to her kitchen door. 
The lock gave easily when I commanded it to do so. And the door opened as if I had 
touched it, when I had not.
  
  Without a sound I slipped into the small linoleum-tiled room. The stench of gas rising 
from the small white stove was sickening to me. So was the smell of the soap in its 
sticky ceramic dish. But the room touched my heart instantly. Beautify! the cherished