The whole run home he kept reliving it. As though every detail had been imprinted deep inside his brain cells, right there alongside fight-or-flight and procreation.
     The way she’d come at him—low, silent, sideways—something half-human in the pre-dawn half light. At first, he couldn’t believe it was happening. And then it had seemed to be happening to someone else.
     He glanced over his shoulder, reassuring himself, then crossed the street so he could run along the stockade fences that went on almost uninterrupted most of the way home. Up ahead, a robin plunged its beak into the grassy strip between the sidewalk and the street and came up with a worm. It flew off, and something about its movement, all quickness and instinct, triggered the whole damn thing all over again, so he felt her fingers on his neck, then his chin, felt them slide up into his mouth, pushing against his teeth like she was probing for a fucking way in.
     He spit, pulled his bandana out of his pocket and wiped his mouth.
     Where the fences ended, he drifted toward the street until he was running down the center of the pavement, away from the low hedges and the trees, glanced over his shoulder again. Behind him, the morning sun was sitting just above the horizon, where it usually sat when he was ending his run; and that surprised him. Because it felt like it took a while to get away, to fend her off without knocking her down, without hurting her. Or maybe just because it happened, it felt like everything should be different.
     He turned up the driveway, past the bashed-in mailbox and the empty trash cans, stopped at the garage and leaned stiff-armed against it, stretching his calves, breathing harder than usual. He glanced back over his shoulder one more time, down the driveway, down the street, but the only thing moving was the Duffy’s cat high-stepping across the side yard with something wet and stringy hanging from the side of its mouth.
     Inside, he locked the door behind him.
     “Hi,” Luanne said without turning around, “you know, I was thinking we could do pancakes today…” She was in her purple robe, standing with one hand on the open refrigerator door, the other on her hip. And for some reason, she was only wearing one slipper. She leaned down and pushed things around on the bottom shelf. “Or…you could just do oatmeal again today and then I’ll do pancakes and eggs on Sunday.” She turned around, gave him a question of a smile.
     The refrigerator compressor kicked in and the aluminum bowls stacked on top began to vibrate. A shaft of sun broke through the window, striking her, bringing out the red in her hair.
     “Then we could do something totally decadent,” she said, “on Sunday. Like burying the eggs in Hollandaise.” He waited for her smile to fade, to turn into a frown, for her to say… “Nick? Nicky are you okay?”
     But the smile stayed and all she said was, “What do you think?”
     He shrugged. “Totally decadent, I guess.”
     Her hand came off the refrigerator and the door swung shut. “Good. Because I don’t feel like cooking this morning.”
     She was pancakes, whole wheat, and eggs. He was oatmeal and French toast. They tried to be careful fat-wise during the week, but on Sunday they ate whatever they wanted—bacon, sausage, cream-filled croissants.
     “Luanne?”
     She was halfway to the stairs and she turned around. Her hair was flat on one side, pushed up on the other. “What?” She yawned, and it hit him what a mess her bathrobe was. Baggy, one pocket ripped. It was the robe she’d been wearing the first time they made love, when they’d known each other for maybe a month and the robe was brand new and he’d shown up early for a change because he’d forgotten to turn his clock back the night before. It was seeing her that way—her hair still damp from the shower, barefoot, smelling great—that ended them up on the sofa, ended up blowing the dinner reservations and the forty dollar theatre tickets. Ended up shifting everything enough toward normal to make him cancel the Monday night sessions with Gotlieb.
     She said that was the reason she kept wearing it, the robe. She got attached to things. She called them lucky. She had a lucky softball hat and a pair of lucky earrings. And she was standing there waiting for him to say something.
     He slid his eyes past her to the living room, to the red and yellow afghan still folded over the back of the sofa even though it was the end of June. Neither one of them had bothered to put it away, and eventually it would start getting cool enough at night to need it again anyway. He shrugged. “Do you want raisins in your oatmeal?”
     She nodded. “But just a touch of cinnamon, okay? Not like yesterday.”
     “Right.” He went to the stove.
     “Nick?”
     She was frowning and he felt his throat get tight at the thought of telling it.
     “Have you seen my other slipper?” She lifted her bare foot off the floor.
     He shook his head. “Maybe Quip took it outside again.”
     She shrugged. “Maybe.”
     He took a pot off a hook, twisted the cardboard top off the oatmeal and listened to her one slipper flapping up the stairs. Why couldn’t he just say it, for Christ’s sake? I got mugged, Luanne. Well, not mugged exactly, attacked. Except it wasn’t really that either. What I got was jumped by this old lady. This crazy old lady.
     And just thinking about it, the whole fucking thing went through his head again, made him shudder just as he was spooning oatmeal into a cup, so pieces of oatmeal went flying all over the counter.
     The cat door thunked and he and Quip eyed each other before the cat walked across the kitchen to the braided rug in front of the sink. Quip was Luanne’s cat.
     “So,” he said, “did you take Luanne’s slipper and leave it outside again?”
     The cat blinked.
     “Would you believe I got attacked by an old lady in the park?”
     Quip made two tight circles before she curled up on the rug.
     He poured cold water into the pan and added the oatmeal. He’d tried it both ways, but there was no difference between letting the water boil first or doing it this way except this way he didn’t have to stand there and wait for the water.
     He looked out the window into the back yard, at the sun climbing the fence. Maybe what he should do was call the police. Report it. For one thing she was too old to be out there homeless, living in the park. Or maybe she was a runaway from a nursing home. He went over to the phone and opened the local book. There was an emergency police number and a non-emergency one. He said the non-emergency number twice under his breath while he thought about what to say. But the thing was, no matter how you put it, it sounded ridiculous. Or maybe they didn’t need all the details. Maybe all they needed to know was that an old lady was in the park acting strange and they should check it out. He started to dial the number, stopped. So why had he kept on running if he saw someone who needed help? He held onto the phone for a second and then hung it up.
     He went back to the stove, turned the heat down and watched the bubbles rise to the surface. Because she’d scared the shit out of him, that’s why.
     Anyway, there were lots of runners through there. By now someone else probably would have seen her, encountered her, and handled it the right way. He flicked a piece of oatmeal off the top of the stove and wondered why he was making the whole thing more complicated than it needed to be.
     “You need to realize, Nicholas, that the time you remember before as simple, wasn’t really. Only in your memory. Only in comparison to what came after.”
     “Go to hell, Gotlieb,” he said.
     Quip opened one eye and looked at him.
     As if the morning wasn’t bad enough already. Now he had to start thinking about that. He took a spoon out of the dish drainer. When he hadn’t seen the guy in ten years, for Christ’s sake. He stirred the oatmeal and turned the heat to low.
     I’d feel easier about this, Nicholas, if you hadn’t simply disappeared…if you’d at least announced your intention to quit.
     Okay, Dr. G., my intention was to quit.
     Hadn’t that shown he was getting his sense of humor back? But then, Gotlieb didn’t believe in humor, did he. Or in spontaneous cures.
     He heard the water start to rush through the pipes, Luanne in the shower, and touched his neck where the old lady’s fingers had dug in. Stronger than she looked. Or maybe it was just being caught so completely off guard.
     He went upstairs and opened the bathroom door, steam escaping into the hall. He closed the door behind him, said, “I just need to brush my teeth, Lu.”
     “Sure,” she said.
     He wiped a clear swath across the mirror with a towel and pulled the neck of his tee shirt away from his skin. He wiped the glass again, expecting to see two or three red welts, maybe a scratch where her nails dug in. But there was nothing.
     Behind him, in the glass, he could see Luanne moving behind the transparent curtain, raising her arm, turning, letting her head fall back. Then the shower went off and she stepped out, took a towel off the hook on the back of the door, pressed the top edge against her face with one hand, and began drying herself. In the mirror he caught a flash of a breast, a thigh, dark pubic hair. Then she looked up and saw him watching her, took a step and leaned into him tight, her arms around his middle.
     “Can you do me a favor?” she said.
     He watched himself nod in the mirror.
     “There are three library books on the kitchen counter. If you have time, can you return them for me on your lunch hour?”
     He turned and put his arms around her.
     “Your wish,” he said. He buried his face against her neck smelling the scent of her soap, faintly spicy, her shampoo, citrusy, and then something else. “Oh shit,” he said, “the oatmeal,” and bolted out the door and down the stairs.

     He placed the three books on the desk in front of the librarian. A woman he’d never seen before, a faded redhead with narrow silver glasses sitting on the edge of her nose. She pulled the books toward her and opened the back cover of each one, checking the due dates, and he stood there waiting, even though he knew they weren’t overdue, that he didn’t have to stand there waiting for the small quick nod she gave him. But somehow, walking away before he was dismissed felt like breaking a rule—thou shalt not leave until thou art given the sign thou art free to do so.
     He’d eaten his lunch in the car on the way over, and now he had thirty-five minutes to kill. It was almost deserted here at noontime. Like a church on Monday, as his father used to say.
     He made his way past the children’s room, empty now except for the big cardboard cutouts of Humpty-Dumpty and the Cheshire cat grinning down from the ceiling. He headed past the New Fiction display toward the mystery stacks. For a while, Luanne had worked here part-time, after she quit the job in town and before she took the job in the museum archives. She’d told him she was working on the reference desk, but when he’d dropped in one afternoon, she wasn’t in reference, she was in the children’s room with a bunch of very small kids who were sitting on the floor all around her. He’d stood where she couldn’t see him, listening to her tell a story about a little chicken who didn’t want to go to bed and whose mother finally gave in and let him stay up all night. There was something in her voice he’d never heard before.
     “Isn’t she wonderful?” Margie Coates had come up behind him. “She really has a knack with them, doesn’t she?”
     He hadn’t known she had a knack. But if she did, what was it supposed to mean…the fact she hadn’t told him what she was really doing here? That she did care about kids? About having kids? That she was just pretending it didn’t matter? That when she went along with him, agreed about the Agent Orange, she was really thinking something else? Thinking maybe they should take the gamble after all? Wishing he were willing? Wishing he could take back the vasectomy? Or wanting it bad enough to use some other guy’s unzapped genes?
     But he could never get himself to bring it up. And then she’d taken the job at the museum, and after a while it had become easy to think it wasn’t important after all.
     He moved slowly down the mystery section, looking for something he hadn’t read. He pulled a P.D. James off the shelf, read the first line, recognized it and put it back, started to pull off another and caught a glimpse of a gray head on the other side of the stack. All of a sudden his mouth was dry, the feeling from the morning flooding back, only worse this time.
     He put one hand on the shelf, rested his head against his arm. Of all the crazy asshole things. It was just some old lady, for Christ’s sake, some fucking old lady looking for a book. What in hell was the matter with him, anyway?
     He started toward the end of the aisle, where he could see a potted plant beneath a window and a pair of feet crossed at the ankles underneath a reading table, one sneaker pumping to some invisible music.
     He kept his eyes on the sneaker, and as he got closer, it expanded into jeans, a sweatshirt, a teenage boy wearing headphones and reading a magazine. He tried to ignore the feeling that the gray head was just on the other side of the shelves, shadowing him through the double layer of books. The teenager glanced up at him, then shifted his attention to whatever it was on the other side of the stack, and the bored look in the kid’s eyes suddenly flicked off.
     He had a sudden ridiculous urge to run, and then Margie Coates came around the end of the stack and walked straight into him. Two books fell off the pile she was carrying, and a little sound came out of her, half surprise, half apology.
     “Why Nick! Of all the people to run into!” She laughed. “Literally!”
     He retrieved her books, managed some small talk while his heart stopped hammering.
     “Now you give my love to Luanne,” she said. “And tell her we miss her.”
     He watched her walk away, could have sworn the last time he saw Margie Coates her hair was black.
     He wandered through New Fiction, giving himself time to calm down, pulling out books, putting them back. He didn’t know what was bothering him more, the incident in the park or the way it seemed to be following him. He wandered past Periodicals, Large Print Books, and then into Reference, where he’d been headed all along without letting himself think about it.
     He stopped in front of the phone books and pulled the East City white pages, ran his finger down the column under Gop-Got. Gotlieb, John; Gotlieb, Joseph; Gotlieb, Justin, Dr. The address was the same. He cleared his throat and put his fingers against his neck, on the spot where there were no marks. He wrote down the phone number.
     
     When his watch alarm went off, he didn’t get right up. He lay there for a while, looking out the window near his side of the bed, watching a star disappear into dawn.
     Thinking had kept him awake most of the night. Thinking about the park. Thinking about that. But mainly thinking about why he couldn’t tell Luanne. Why he didn’t call the police. Why there were no marks on his neck. And when he had slept, he’d dreamed about Gotlieb slouching sideways in the black director’s chair, talking in that slow monotone that used to drive him crazy.
     Crazy.
     He rolled onto his back.
     We all live with our various darker incarnations, Nicholas. They’re just below the skin. The hateful ten-year-old, the rebellious teen, the thoughtless son, the callous lover. The hateful is as much a part of us as the admirable—more so because it defines us indelibly by our very attention to it. We are supposed to act admirably, Nicholas. It’s what’s expected, a mere ripple we hardly notice. Acting otherwise, however, causes great waves we cannot ignore.
     He closed his eyes and pictured a tsunami at his back.
     We cannot dispel whatever demon we carry, Nicholas, or the power it holds over us, until we acknowledge it, speak it. Until we confront and rage and weep over it. Only unlocked will it lose its force. Confession, Nicholas, as uneasy and painful as it may be, was invented to allow us to come to a kind of peace. And if we fail to use it, if we keep our demons to ourselves, then we are doing so at great risk.
     Bullshit. That’s what he’d said then.
     Beside him, Luanne sighed in her sleep, and as though it was a signal, he swung his legs off the bed, pulled on his shorts and a tee shirt, grabbed some folded socks off the pile of clean clothes, fished his sneakers out from under the chair where Quip slept with her tail wrapped around her nose.
     Downstairs, he opened the kitchen door and scooped the paper off the top step, tossed it back onto the table. When he closed the door behind him, he held onto the knob a second, listening to the sound of a semi shifting gears out on the freeway, remembering the way it used to feel, rolling through strange towns at dawn with a thousand miles behind him and a thousand more to go. The only job he could keep longer than a week then. A different kind of running. How after ten hours behind the wheel, his brain would start doing funny things. Make him swear he was seeing his mother on the side of the road in her gardening hat, waving. Trick him into smelling the joint Corporal Gonzales held out to him from the passenger seat. Trick him, even, into reaching for it. Still, he’d known the difference then, known he wasn’t seeing what he was seeing even while he was seeing it.
     He let go of the knob.
     He started his warm-up, doing it automatically at first, then gradually getting into it, pushing hard into each stretch, extending each lunge. He did double sets, and when he was finished, he did it all over again so by the time he was done, he was already sweating.
     Running down the driveway, he thought about turning left, heading downtown where there’d be cops sitting in front of the 24 hour store, DPW trucks setting out cones around the work area on Main Street, where there’d be traffic even at five-thirty in the morning.
     But at the end of the driveway he turned right. A test.
     You don’t believe in demons, Nicholas…?
     I don’t believe in exorcism, Dr. G.
     It kept the sessions interesting…the parrying and blocking.
     Then you believe in demons. And you believe in holding on to them…?
     He imagined a giant Gotlieb taking hold of him by the ankles, holding him upside down and shaking the demons out.
     I cannot reach down inside you and pull them out, Nicholas.
     As if the fucker had read his mind.
     I have no demons, Dr. G.  I only have problems getting up in the morning. I have problems keeping appointments. I have problems remembering things. I have a problem with time.
     You have an alarm clock, Nicholas. You have a watch. You have note paper on which you can leave yourself memos. Perhaps your problem is not with this time, but with another?
     He rounded the corner onto the road to the park. He was running too fast, his breath already loud and ragged, and when he ran between the park’s wrought iron gates, he began to swing his eyes from side to side. The sky was light enough now to see details in the shadows and he made himself shorten his stride, made himself slow down against the pull of the adrenaline.
     It’s like this Dr. G….
     He’d tried the words in his mind dozens of times, had imagined saying them across the charcoal carpet and the chrome and glass coffee table, against the dim sound of the nighttime traffic outside the office window.
     I killed two kids in a place called Binh Son. Not that I meant to, although I did fire deliberately. You have to understand that after a while, you fired at everything. Birds. Leaves. Wind. Rain. The sound of your own fart. You wanted to get it before it got you.
     The smaller one, a girl I think. She landed on her back with one hand across her forehead. It could have been she was playing at being dead. But the other one, a boy, he’d taken it in the head, so there wasn’t any other way to see that. And then the old woman came running. She kept trying to pick them up, first one, then the other, and finally she dropped down on her knees between them and looked at me. But I remember that it didn’t feel like she was looking at me. It felt like we were both looking at somebody else. Like I was watching from the side, and the soldier was somebody I didn’t know any better than she did.
     And then it hit me, standing there off to the side, that what he should do was kill her, too. That it would be a kind of solution for them both, better somehow. And as soon as I thought that, she leaned toward the soldier, leaned toward him as though she’d heard what I was thinking. As though she agreed.
     He’d tried to imagine Gotlieb’s face after he said it, and it was as far as he’d ever got with the telling because he knew Gotlieb’s face would register nothing. As though he’d told him he’d bought a new shirt or overdrawn his checking account, told him he was coming down with a slight cold.
     You can tell me anything, Nicholas. I am not here to be judgmental. That is something you can rely on without exception.
     So that’s what killing two kids on a June morning with an M-16 would come down to in the end. Dispassion. As though, after all, it didn’t really amount to very much.
     There was the far-off hoot of a siren, the whining sound of a jet high overhead, and when he got near the place where the old woman had come at him, everything inside his intestines turned liquid. His eyes filled and he tried to blink away the blur, but before he could, his foot rolled on something, a stick, a stone, and his ankle turned, made him lurch, and as the quick flash of pain beat its way up his leg, it occurred to him for the first time in a long time that putting the old woman out of her misery wasn’t the end, had only partly finished it.

     “I cut up fruit for your cereal.” Luanne was sitting at the table reading the paper when he came in. “Want some juice?”
     He shook his head.
     She tapped the paper. “Did you see this?” She turned it toward him.
     He glanced at the page, not really interested, and it took a second for the headline to sink in. Then when it did, the floor seemed to shift under his feet and he had to lean on the table to steady himself.
     “You didn’t see her, did you?”
     He looked at the picture of the old lady being led toward the police car.
     “Nick?”
     He looked up from the paper. “Huh?”
     “Did you see her? An old lady in the park. She was harassing people. Running after them, grabbing them.” She frowned, tiny lines forming along the bridge of her nose. “Are you okay?”
     “Yeah. I mean, I tripped, twisted my ankle. But it’s not bad.” He shook his head. “No. I didn’t see her.”
     He lifted one hand off the table and fingered the purple sleeve of her bathrobe.
     She shrugged. “It’s a mess, isn’t it. I suppose it’s time to throw it out and get a new one.” She sighed.
     He looked at the paper again. “Luanne…”
     She was lifting a piece of toast and she took a bite, looking at him, waiting for whatever it was he was going to tell her.
     And for just a moment, he wondered what it would be like to be free of it, in the time it took to reprogram a glitch in a client’s software, in the time it took to watch one of Luanne’s softball games, in the time it took to listen to her sing Happy Birthday while his candles melted into the icing. And he wondered where spilled demons went, imagining them piled on Gotlieb’s charcoal carpet like dead flies. Imagining them stored behind Luanne’s eyes, hidden there beside the images of the children they’d never have.