The Window

I am alone with the man I am going to kill. Two hundred yards separate us, but the scope reduces the distance to mere feet. Lying on the grass slope, screened by yew-bushes, I watch him, the target, the victim, the contract. He has a name, but in these final moments I have scrubbed it from my mind. It is better for both of us if our transaction remains impersonal. There is a reason, of course, why I am here, a motive for his murder, but I do not know it, and nor will he. It no longer matters to either of us. Not now. Yet the very anonymity of our relationship confers its own intimacy. We are actors, he and I, participants in an old drama: killer and victim, the one incomplete without the other.

He is sitting at the solitary table, finishing his room-service dinner: a plate of linguini, the sauce tinged the color of slime by the infrared scope, the noodles long and white as tapeworms, twining on his fork. I hope the food is good, but I know better. I have eaten too many room service meals, spent too long in those same hotels. At least the window is big. It offers him a view of the rear parking-lot, and me a view of his room. The lights and the standing-lamps are all on, but I do not need their illumination. The scope rinses the room in its own undersea glow: a green-white phosphorescence that both reveals and dims. A postmortem hue, I have always thought. It is as if we share a purgatory: he condemned to relive his final minutes; me condemned to watch them.

The man dabs his lips, sets the napkin on his plate, and gets up. I track him, steadying the rifle, pressing my cheek to the cool of its stock. He is crossing the room, his back to the window. His feet are bare, I notice. I’m glad. Hotel carpet is pleasant on bare feet. My own feet, chilled by the night air, tingle in sympathy. I can feel the rubbed warmth of nap, the prickle of static on his toes. He is in the half-hall that leads to the door: a grotto in the green dimness. Is he leaving his room? Checking out, driving into the night, away from my waiting scope? No; he is turning left: the bathroom. Light spills from an open doorway. I can no longer see him; he is offstage, but I know what he is doing. The distance between us melts. I am with him now.

I am at the sink, gazing at myself in the mirror. I can see the bristles on my chin, feel the grainy itch of the shaving cut below my right ear. The tiles underfoot are cold; I want to leave the bathroom, step back onto the carpet, its plushy friction. From the cellophane-wrapped cup I take my toothbrush. The alfredo is already souring, a creamy mildew on my tongue. I brush staring into the mirror, hypnotized by the rabid grimace of my reflection, the foam white-blue on its lips. When I spit, the foam is flecked with blood.

The tap water is cold, numbing my raw gums. I listen to the trill it makes in my throat, a sound like birdsong heard underwater. When I spit again, there is no blood. My mouth tastes of mint and cold steel. I turn from the mirror and go back into my room, letting my feet linger on the carpet.

Dizzied, I return to myself, my elbows in the damp grass, the rifle against my shoulder, my eye on the scope. I wait for my vertigo to pass; for me to settle back into my own life, to remember my role in this vignette. My pulse slows. I have the gun; the gun has the bullet; the bullet has the target. The axioms of assassination never change, and, therefore, neither can the intent of the assassin.

Bending over the nightstand, he opens the drawer, from which he takes the Bible. Last meal, last prayers. Still we revert to cliches, to the reassurance of actions already taken, of thoughts shared by different minds. The Bible has comforted millions of condemned men, why shouldn’t it comfort one more? He is flipping through the pages now, his perusal growing more frantic. The flimsy pages chatter in my hands as I turn them. Through each in turn, I can see the black text of the next: layers of tissue transparency, beneath which I can find no meaning, no reason why my killer is waiting in the darkness, into which his bullet will take me. He closes the Bible.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, he looks at his reflection in the window, through which I look back at him, like the phantom mind behind his mirrored eyes. I wonder for a moment if the connection between us runs both ways; if he is watching himself through the scope, waiting to fire the bullet through his own head. But he, I, can see only the darkness beyond my reflected face.

The crosshairs hang on his chest like a cruciform. I adjust my aim. The cruciform touches the center of his forehead. On the wall behind him is a painting: a pond, two old men in a rowboat, paddling out of, or into, pastel fog. His brains will spatter the painting: a bloody sunset in the fog. I will lie across my bed, and my brains will dry and blacken on the wall, the painting now a mirror reflecting the night outside,

I watch myself in the window. My mouth is clean, my feet warm on the carpet. I want to sleep, to feel the warmth, and then the absence of all feeling that the darkness outside promises. I can feel the sleep coming, the warmth deepening before it disappears. And I am alone in that darkness.