Gradually I saw the blurred and overlapping images of their thoughts, rising like a 
million fluttering birds into the firmament. Give me my killer, give me his vision!
  
  He was there, in a small dingy room, very unlike this one, yet only two blocks from it, 
just rising from his bed. His cheap clothes were rumpled, sweat covering his coarse face, 
a thick nervous hand going for the cigarettes in his shirt pocket, then letting them 
go-already forgotten. A heavy man he was, of shapeless facial features and a look full of 
vague worry, or dim regret.
  
  It did not occur to him to dress for the evening, for the Feast for which he'd been 
hungering. And now his waking mind was almost collapsed beneath the burden of his ugly 
palpitating dreams. He shook himself all over, loose greasy hair falling onto his sloping 
forehead, eyes like bits of black glass.
  
  Standing still in the silent shadows of my room, I continued to track him, to follow 
down a back stairs, and out into the garish light of Collins Avenue, past dusty shop 
windows and sagging commercial signs, propelled onward, towards the inevitable and yet 
unchosen object of his desire.
  
  And who might she be, the lucky lady, wandering blindly and inexorably towards this 
horror, through the sparse and dismal crowds of the early evening in this same dreary 
region of town? Does she carry a carton of milk and a head of lettuce in a brown paper 
bag? Will she hurry at the sight of the cutthroats on the corner? Does she grieve for the 
old beachfront where she lived perhaps so contentedly before the architects and the 
decorators drove her to the cracked and peeling hostelries further away?
  
  And what will he think when he finally spots her, this filthy angel of death? Will she 
be the very one to remind him of the mythic shrew of childhood, who beat him senseless 
only to be elevated to the nightmare pantheon of his subconscious, or are we asking too 
much?
  
  I mean there are killers of this species who make not the smallest connection between 
symbol and reality, and remember nothing for longer than a few days. What is certain is 
only that their victims don't deserve it, and that they, the killers, deserve to meet 
with me.
  
  Ah, well, I will tear out his menacing heart before he has had a chance to "do" her, 
and he will give me everything that he has, and is.
  
  I walked slowly down the steps, and through the smart, glittering art deco lobby with 
its magazine-page glamour. How good it felt to be moving like a mortal, to open the 
doors, to wander out into the fresh air. I headed north along the sidewalk among the 
evening strollers, eyes drifting naturally over the newly refurbished hotels and their 
little cafes.
  
  The crowd thickened as I reached the corner. Before a fancy open-air restaurant, giant 
television cameras focused their lenses on a stretch of sidewalk harshly illuminated by 
enormous white lights. Trucks blocked the traffic; cars slowed to a stop. A loose crowd 
had gathered of young and old, only mildly fascinated, for television and motion picture 
cameras in the vicinity of South Beach were a familiar sight.
  
  I skirted the lights, fearing their effect upon my highly reflective face. Would I were 
one of the tan-skinned ones, smelling of expensive beach oils, and half naked in friable 
cotton rags. I made my way around the corner. Again, I scanned for the prey. He was 
racing, his mind so thick with hallucinations that he could scarce control his shuffling, 
sloppy steps.
  
  There was no time left.
  
  With a little spurt of speed, I took to the low roofs. The breeze was stronger, 
sweeter. Gentle the roar of excited voices, the dull natural songs of radios, the sound 
of the wind itself.
  
  In silence I caught his image in the indifferent eyes of those who passed him; in 
silence I saw his fantasies once more of withered hands and withered feet, of shrunken 
cheeks and shrunken breasts. The thin membrane between fantasy and reality was breaking.
  
  I hit the pavements of Collins Avenue, so swiftly perhaps I simply seemed to appear. 
But nobody was looking. I was the proverbial tree falling in the uninhabited forest.
  
  And in minutes, I was ambling along, steps behind him, a menacing young man perhaps, 
piercing the little clusters of tough guys who blocked the path, pursuing the prey 
through the glass doors of a giant ice-cooled drugstore. Ah, such a circus for the 
eye-this low-ceilinged cave-chock-full of every imaginable kind of packageable and 
preserved foodstuff, toilet article, and hair accoutrement, ninety percent of which 
existed not at all in any form whatsoever during the century when I was born.
  
  We're talking sanitary napkins, medicinal eyedrops, plastic bobby pins, felt-tip 
markers, creams and ointments for all nameable parts of the human body, dishwashing 
liquid in every color of the rainbow, and cosmetic rinses in some colors never before 
invented and yet undefined. Imagine Louis XVI opening a noisy crackling plastic sack of 
such wonders? What would he think of Styrofoam coffee cups, chocolate cookies wrapped in 
cellophane, or pens that never run out of ink?
  
  Well, I'm still not entirely used to these items myself, though I've watched the 
progress of the Industrial Revolution for two centuries with my own eyes. Such drugstores 
can keep me enthralled for hours on end. Sometimes I become spellbound in the middle of 
Wal-Mart.
  
  But this time I had a prey hi my sights, didn't I? Later for Time and Vogue, pocket 
computer language translators, and wristwatches that continue to tell time even as you 
swim in the sea.
  
  Why had he come to this place? The young Cuban families with babies in tow were not his 
style. Yet aimlessly he wandered the narrow crowded aisles, oblivious to the hundreds of 
dark faces and the fast riffs of Spanish around him, unnoticed by anyone but me, as his 
red-rimmed eyes swept the cluttered shelves.
  
  Lord God, but he was filthy-all decency lost in his mania, craggy face and neck creased