There was, however, a small light above the kitchen stove. Turn it on for one second and check his watch? He had too complicated a mind to be a killer, too much imagination for it. He could see no rational risk in turning on the stove light, but part of having a complicated mind was understanding its limits, understanding that it couldn’t think of everything. Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity. An interesting paradox. But it didn’t answer the question of whether he should turn the light on.
And why was it so important to look at his watch? He couldn’t actually think of why. This went to his point about intelligence and its limits. He leaned the shovel against the back door and sat down cross-legged on the mud rug. Then he worried that the shovel was going to fall over. He reached to steady it with such an unsteady hand that he knocked it over. The noise was catastrophic. He jumped to his feet and turned on the stove light long enough to check his watch. He still had at least thirty minutes, probably more like forty-five.
He sat down on the rug again and fell into a state like a fever dream in every respect except that he was fully aware of being asleep. It was like being dead without the relief from torment. And maybe the adage had it backward, maybe every murder was a suicide gone awry, because what he was feeling, besides an all-permeating compassion for his tormented self, was that he had to follow through with the killing to put himself out of his misery. He wouldn’t be the one dying, but he might as well have been, because the relief that would follow the killing had a deathlike depth and finality in prospect.
For no apparent reason, he snapped out of his dream and into a state of chill clarity. Had he heard something? There was nothing but the trickle and patter of light rain. It seemed to him as if a lot of time had passed. He stood up and grasped the handle of the shovel. He was having a new bad thought—that, for all his care in planning, all his anxiety, he’d somehow neglected to consider what he would do if Annagret and her stepfather simply didn’t show up; he’d been so obsessed with logistics that he hadn’t noticed this enormous blind spot, and now, because the weekend was coming and his parents might be out here, he was facing the task of refilling the hole he’d dug for nothing—when he heard a low voice outside the kitchen window.
A girl’s voice. Annagret.
Where was the bike? How could he not have heard the bike? Had they walked it down the driveway? The bike was essential.
He heard a male voice, somewhat louder. They were going around behind the house. It was all happening so quickly. He was shaking so much that he could hardly stand. He didn’t dare touch the doorknob for fear of making a sound.
“The key’s on a hook,” he heard Annagret say.
He heard her feet on the steps. And then: a floor-shaking thud, a loud grunt.
He grabbed the doorknob and turned it the wrong way and then the right way. As he ran out, he thought he didn’t have the shovel, but he did. It was in his hands, and he brought the convex side of its blade down hard on the dark shape looming up in front of him. The body collapsed on the steps. He was a murderer now.
Pausing to make sure of where the body’s head was, he raised the shovel over his shoulder and hit the head so hard he heard the skull crack. Everything so far fully within the bounds of planned logistics. Annagret was somewhere to his left, making the worst sound he’d ever heard, a moan-keen-retch-strangulation sound. Without looking in her direction, he scrambled down past the body, dropped the shovel, and pulled the body off the steps by its feet. Its head was on its side now. He picked up the shovel and hit the head on the temple as hard as he could, to make sure. At the second crack of skull, Annagret gave a terrible cry.
“It’s over,” he said, breathing hard. “There won’t be any more of it.”
He dimly saw her moving on the porch, coming to the railing. Then he heard the strangely childish and almost dear sounds of her throwing up. He didn’t feel sick himself. More like postorgasmic; immensely weary and even more immensely sad. He wasn’t going to throw up, but he began to cry, making his own childish sounds. He dropped the shovel, sank to his knees, and sobbed. His mind was empty, but not of sadness.
The drizzle was so fine it was almost a mist. When he’d cried himself dry, he felt so tired that his first thought was that he and Annagret should go to the police and turn themselves in. He didn’t see how he could do what still had to be done. Killing had brought no relief at all—what had he been thinking? The relief would be to turn himself in at the police station.
Annagret had been still while he cried, but now she came down from the porch and crouched by him. At the touch of her hand on his shoulder, he sobbed again.
“Shh, shh,” she said.
She put her face to his wet cheek. The feel of her skin, the mercy of her warm proximity: his weariness evaporated.
“I must smell like vomit,” she said.
“No.”
“Is he dead?”
“He must be.”
“This is the real bad dream. Right now. Before wasn’t so bad. This is the real bad.”
“I know.”
She began to cry voicelessly, huffingly, and he took her in his arms. He could feel her tension escaping in the form of whole-body tremors. Her tension must have been unspeakably bad, and there was nothing he could do with his compassion except to hold her until the tremors subsided. When they finally did, she wiped her nose on her sleeve and pressed her face to his. She opened her mouth against his cheek, a kind of kiss. They were partners, and it would have been natural to go inside the house and seal their partnership, and this was how he knew for certain that his love for her was pure: he pulled away and stood up.
“Don’t you like me?” she whispered.
“Actually, I love you.”
“I want to come and see you. I don’t care if they catch us.”
“I want to see you, too. But it’s not right. Not safe. Not for a long time.”
In the darkness, at his feet, she seemed to slump. “Then I’m completely alone.”
“You can think of me thinking of you, because that’s what I’ll be doing whenever you think of me.”
She made a little snorting sound, possibly mirthful. “I barely even know you.”
“Safe to say I don’t make a habit of killing people.”
“It’s a terrible thing,” she said, “but I guess I should thank you. Thank you for killing him.” She made another possibly mirthful sound. “Just hearing myself say that makes me all the more sure that I’m the bad one. I made him want me, and then I made you do this.”
Andreas was aware that time was passing. “What happened with the motorcycle?”
She didn’t answer.
“Is the motorcycle here?”
“No.” She took a deep breath. “He was doing maintenance after dinner. He didn’t have it put back together when I went to meet him—he needed some new part. He said we should go out some other night.”
Not very ardent of him, Andreas thought.
“I thought maybe he’d gotten suspicious,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do, but I said I really wanted it to be tonight.”
Andreas again suppressed the thought of how she’d persuaded the stepfather.
“So we took the train,” she said.
“Not good.”
“I’m sorry!”
“No, it was the right thing to do, but it makes things harder for us.”
“We didn’t sit together. I said it was safer not to.”
Soon other riders on the train would be seeing the missing man’s picture in the newspaper, maybe even on television. The entire plan had hinged on the motorcycle. But Andreas needed to keep her morale up. “You’re very smart,” he said. “You did the right thing. I’m just worried that even the earliest train won’t get you home in time.”
“My mother goes straight to bed when she comes home. I left my bedroom door closed.”
“You thought of that.”
“Just to be safe.”
> “You’re very, very smart.”
“Not smart enough. They’re going to catch us. I’m sure of it. We shouldn’t have taken the train, I hate trains, people stare at me, they’ll remember me. But I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Just keep being smart. The hardest part is behind you.”
She clutched his arms and pulled herself to her feet. “Please kiss me,” she said. “Just once, so I can remember it.”
He kissed her forehead.
“No, on the mouth,” she said. “We’re going to be in jail forever. I want to have kissed you. It’s all I’ve been thinking about. It’s the only way I got through the week.”
He was afraid of where a kiss might lead—time was continuing to pass—but he needn’t have been. Annagret kept her lips solemnly closed. She must have been seeking the same thing he was. A cleaner way, an escape from the filth. For his part, the darkness of the night was a blessing: if he could have seen the look in her eyes more clearly, he might not have been able to let go of her.
While she waited in the driveway, away from the body, he went inside the house. The kitchen felt steeped in the evil of his lying in ambush there, the evil contrast between a world in which Horst had been alive and the world where he was dead, but he forced himself to put his head under the faucet and gulp down water. Then he went to the front porch and put his socks and boots back on. He found the flashlight in one of the boots.
When he came around the side of the house, Annagret ran to him and kissed him heedlessly, with open mouth, her hands in his hair. She was heartbreakingly teenaged, and he didn’t know what to do. He wanted to give her what she wanted—he wanted it himself—but he was aware that what she ought to want, in the larger scheme, was to not get caught. It was painful to be older and more rational, painful to be the enforcer. He took her face in his gloved hands and said, “I love you, but we have to stop.”
She shivered and burrowed into him. “Let’s have one night and then be caught. I’ve done all I can.”
“Let’s not be caught and then have many nights.”
“He wasn’t such a bad person, he just needed help.”
“You need to help me for one minute. One minute and then you can lie down and sleep.”
“It’s too awful.”
“All you have to do is steady the wheelbarrow. You can keep your eyes shut. Can you do that for me?”
In the darkness, he thought he could see her nod. He left her and picked his way back to the toolshed. It would be a lot easier to get the body in the wheelbarrow if she helped him, but he found that he welcomed the prospect of wrangling the body by himself. He was protecting her from direct contact, keeping her as safe as he could, and he wanted her to know it.
The body was in coveralls, work clothes from the power plant, suitable for motorcycle maintenance but not for a hot date in the country. It was hard to escape the conclusion that the fucker really hadn’t intended to come out here tonight, but Andreas did his best to escape it. He rolled the body onto its back. It was heavy with gym-trained muscle. He found its wallet and zipped it into his own jacket, and then he tried to lift the body by its coveralls, but the fabric ripped. He was obliged to apply a bear hug to wrestle the head and torso onto the wheelbarrow.
The wheelbarrow tipped over sideways. Neither he nor Annagret said anything. They just tried again.
There were further struggles behind the shed. She had to help him by pushing on the wheelbarrow’s handles while he pulled from the front. The footprint situation was undoubtedly appalling. When they were finally beside the grave, they stood and caught their breath. Water was softly dripping from pine needles, the scent of the needles mixing with the sharp and vaguely cocoa smell of fresh-turned earth.
“That wasn’t so bad,” she said.
“I’m sorry you had to help.”
“It’s just … I don’t know.”
“What is it?”
“Are we sure there’s not a God?”
“It’s a pretty far-fetched idea, don’t you think?”
“I have the strongest feeling that he’s still alive somewhere.”
“Where, though? How could that be?”
“It’s just a feeling I have.”
“He used to be your friend. This is so much harder for you than for me.”
“Do you think he was in pain? Was he frightened?”
“Honestly, no. It happened very fast. And now that he’s dead he can’t remember pain. It’s as if he’d never existed.”
He wanted her to believe this, but he wasn’t sure he believed it himself. If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it. And so, if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, as everyone would agree, then inflicting three seconds of it was no less wrong. He caught a fleeting glimpse of God in the math here, in the infinitesimal duration of a life. No death could be quick enough to excuse inflicting pain. If you were capable of doing the math, it meant that a morality was lurking in it.
“Well,” Annagret said in a harder voice. “If there is a God, I guess my friend is on his way to hell for raping me. I’d personally be happier if he was in heaven. Putting him in a hole is enough for me. But they say God plays by tougher rules.”
“Who told you that?”
“My father, before he died. He couldn’t figure out what God was punishing him for.”
She hadn’t talked about her father before. If time hadn’t been passing, Andreas would have wanted to hear everything, know everything about her. He loved that she wasn’t consistent; was possibly even somewhat dishonest. This was the first time she’d used the word rape, and she was seeming less unfamiliar with religion than she’d made herself out to be, at the church. His wish to puzzle her out was as strong as his wish to lie down with her; the two desires almost amounted to the same thing. But time was passing. He didn’t have a muscle that wasn’t hurting, but he jumped into the grave and set about deepening it.
“I’m the one who should be doing that.”
“Go in the shed and lie down. Try to sleep.”
“I wish we knew each other better.”
“Me, too. But you need to try to sleep.”
She watched in silence for a long time, half an hour, while he dug. He had a confusing twinned sense of her closeness and complete otherness. Together, they’d killed a man, but she had her own thoughts, her own motives, so close to him and yet so separate. And again he felt grateful to her, because she wasn’t just smart in his male way, she was smart in female ways he wasn’t. She’d seen immediately how important it was to be together—what a ceaseless torture it would be to remain apart, after what they’d done—while he hadn’t seen it until now. She was just fifteen, but she was quick and he was slow.
Only after she went to lie down did his mind shift back into logistics mode. He dug until three o’clock and then, without pausing, dragged and rolled the body into the hole and jumped down after it to wrestle it into a supine position. He didn’t want to have to remember the face, so he sprinkled some dirt over it. Then he turned on the flashlight and inspected the body for jewelry. There was a heavy watch, not inexpensive, and a sleazy gold neck chain. The watch came off easily, but to break the chain he had to plant a hand on the dirt-covered forehead and yank. Fortunately nothing was real, at least not for long. Infinitesimally soon, the eternity of his own death would commence and render all of this unreal.
In two hours he had the hole refilled and was jumping on the dirt, compacting it. When he returned to the toolshed, the beam of the flashlight found Annagret huddled in a corner of it, shivering, her arms around her knees. He didn’t know which was more unbearable to see, her beauty or her suffering. He turned the light off.
“Did you sleep?”
“Yeah. I woke up freezing.”
“I don’t suppose you noticed when the first train comes.”
“Five thirty-eight.”
“You’re remarkable.”
&nbs
p; “He was the one who checked the time. It wasn’t me.”
“Do you want to go over your story with me?”
“No, I’ve been thinking about it. I know what to say.”
The mood between the two of them felt cold and chalky now. For the first time, it occurred to Andreas that they might have no future together—that they’d done a terrible thing and would henceforth dislike each other for it. Love crushed by crime. Already it seemed like a very long time since she’d run to him and kissed him. Maybe she’d been right; maybe they should have spent one night together and then turned themselves in.
“If nothing happens in a year,” he said, “and if you think you’re not being watched, it might be safe to see each other again.”
“It might as well be a hundred years,” she said bitterly.
“I’ll be thinking of you the whole time. Every day. Every hour.”
He heard her standing up.
“I’m going to the station now,” she said.
“Wait twenty minutes. You don’t want to be seen standing around there.”
“I have to warm up. I’ll run somewhere and then go to the station.”
“I’m sorry about this.”
“Not as sorry as I am.”
“Are you angry at me? You can be. Whatever you need to be is fine with me.”
“I’m just sick. They’ll ask me one question, and everything will be obvious. I feel too sick to pretend.”
“You came home at nine thirty and he wasn’t there. You went to bed because you weren’t feeling well…”
“I already said we don’t have to go over it.”
“I’m sorry.”
She moved toward the door, bumped into him, and continued on outside. Somewhere in the darkness, she stopped. “So I guess I’ll see you in a hundred years.”
“Annagret.”
He could hear the earth sucking at her footsteps, see her dark form receding across the back yard. He’d never in his life felt more tired. But finishing his tasks was more bearable than thinking about her. Using the flashlight sparingly, he covered the grave with older and then fresher pine needles, did his best to kick away footprints and wheelbarrow ruts, and artfully strewed leaf litter and lawn waste. His boots and jacket sleeves were hopelessly muddy, but he was too spent to muster anxiety about it. At least he could change his pants.