Excerpt One
Teresa and I often made love, though never in the flesh. To this day the psychiatrists will scrutinize such a statement as if it meant something other than what it plainly says, as if it were the telltale boil of some rare mental pox that might explain the blood spills photographed by the police. But these doctors do not understand love, optics, metaphysics, error, or even good taste. As far as flesh went, I never touched or even talked to Teresa, not until our moral decline had already begun. Before then, seeing the chaste tables that divided us in the Columbia library less than a decade ago, in the middle years of the 1990s, you might have thought Teresa and I were strangers, that she didn’t know I was alive.

I first saw her early in my junior year, a new female sitting several tables away in the Burgess-Carpenter reading room on the fourth floor of Butler Library. She seemed at first like any other of the pretty women on campus whom I liked to ogle and who regarded me as if I were invisible. But the more I stared at her, the more she particularly interested me. A pile of books rested near her elbow on the blond pine table, her head bent with rapt attention over her open book. Hazy September sunlight from the tall windows bathed her small breasts in her magenta top, made the white skin of her forearms glow. Her dark-brown hair was long and luxuriant, her neck long, her face shaped like that of a Raphael Madonna. But what captured me most were her eyes—large, sad eyes, ringed with mauve circles as if she hadn’t slept well. Why was she sad? Was there something I could do to make her happier?

We sat like that for a long time, she near the east end of a table in the back, never noticing me, while I shot frequent glances at her from near the west end of the second table from the door. About twenty feet diagonally divided us, too far for me to discern her eye color, though I tried. Finally, she got up, gathering her books into a white canvas tote bag and walking toward the door. As her gangly frame passed me, I gave her eyes a good look and saw they were hazel, flickering elusively under their long lashes from green to brown to gold.

The thought of her big, sad, long-lashed hazel eyes kept me happy for the rest of my day at Columbia. Even when I boarded the downtown Number One train, the first of the three trains that every evening buried me back in Jamaica, Queens, I was still thinking of those eyes. But an hour and fifteen minutes in the subways will discourage anyone. By the time I left the second leg, the D train, for the final and longest leg, the F, my thoughts were turning dark. The train was crowded with smelly, loam-colored laborers imported from faraway continents, and me just one of the horde.

Most students at Columbia boarded, but because my family was poorer than that of the standard Ivy Leaguer, I was a commuter. Combined with my natural tendency toward solitude, this meant I had no friends either on campus or anywhere else. I longed to make contact with someone, anyone, but did not know how. Sometimes I just wanted to pet them—the young secretary sitting before me on the subway in vinyl jacket and glittery eyeliner—to touch her shoulder, her pulsing throat, and say, “I am here. I am lonely. Help me.” Sometimes I wanted to hit them—the goon in the Yankees cap. When I felt particularly desperate, I wanted to stab them. I had knives that would have fit that purpose, but I never took them out of the house.

Excerpt Two
ON FRIDAY, October 14, the night I would later call our anniversary, I sat at home discouraged and, to try to cheer myself up, pulled out the red locked box from under my bed. Inside was emergency cash, and under the cash cheaply printed manuals with titles like Mastering the Blade, ordered from ads in mercenary and survivalist magazines. Under those were my knives.

Knives only, of course—no guns. Any idiot could kill with a gun; only an artist with a knife. My room contained other articles related to my pretense that I would one day be a serial killer, the way many gun owners pretend they will one day shoot down a gang of home invaders. As with most gun owners, it was only a hobby. I had no real intention of killing, only a sense of satisfaction in fantasizing about it. Most of the articles related to my dream career were behind a false wall in my closet: disguise materials, instructional videos, a mannequin for target practice. But the weapons in my red box were the most comforting items I owned.

I fingered the four stilettos, flicked open the switchblade. I toyed with the hunting knife and the combat knife. But my favorite blade was the dagger. It was a long, clean piece of steel, my mirrored face rippling in its double edges, the ebon hilt ribbed. Whenever I was in deepest despair, whenever all seemed a lie, from the time just after my mother’s death eight years ago to now, this knife preserved me, this knife shone bright against blackest doubt.

Yet now even the dagger seemed false. I would never use it. I had developed a proof that it was morally acceptable to kill, but I had never put it to the test. I would never make any real effort to leave a mark on the world, or even just touch someone, touch a woman, the way I wanted to touch Tracy. At twenty, I was still a virgin. I locked up the red box again and shoved it under my bed, Then I paced my room while a classical station played the Symphonie Fantastique.

How did Tracy feel about me? Without talking to her, I would have no way to know if she wanted me. We might live our whole lives harboring a secret love for each other. We would desire each other torridly, and only we would ever know. A theoretical question struck me—if, without speaking, she and I were somehow sure of the other’s love, wouldn’t that be enough? Couldn’t there be joy enough in the abstract certainty that we were loved?

The second movement of the symphony was playing, the madly reeling waltz. Philosophically, I have no problem with a lie. A nihilist at bottom, I am aware that nothing in the universe can be truly known and no source of love trusted. Therefore it is every man’s prerogative to make up lies and stick to them, or die in a whirlwind of doubt and disorientation. As long as my fictions are not irresolvably contradicted by sense experience, I am free to assign them all the validity of absolute truth. The only problem is a psychological one: how to transform a fiction regarded with pleasure into a truth believed absolutely.

I lay in bed listening to Berlioz and thinking about Tracy’s eyes. Irises shifting from brown to gold to green, hollows a sleepless mauve. If only I were sure those eyes were filled with love for me. If only I knew beyond a doubt that Tracy and I were made for each other. Her eyes seemed traced in the cracks of my ceiling, her mouth etched in plaster, her lips parted to speak.

Something was pushing inside my brain. It seemed to throb against a wad of tissue, a living fence with a primitive U-shaped bar locking the gate. To lift the bar would be dangerous, but the thing pushed and rattled, pulsing with an almost electronic buzz. My craving to let it enter was all but irresistible. With the effort of will required to flick on a radio, I unlocked the gate. And she called my name: “Paul.”