Most people are too weak to keep a secret,

but I knew knowledge gives a person power.

I came there every evening—or at least

whenever I could sneak away from her.

One night I started whispering down the well.

What was it like, I asked him, to be dead?

What was there left without your family,

your home, your friends, even your name forgotten,

the light shut out, the moist earth pressing round?

Of course he didn’t answer me. The dead

never do. Not him. Not even Jesus.

Only a razor’s edge of moonlight gleamed,

silent at the bottom of the well.

I realized that if he could return,

if he could rise again through the dark shaft

and stand there in the sun, breathing the air,

what use would all our morals be to him?

Death leaves an emptiness that words can’t fill.

No, he would seize whatever things he wanted,

and what would guilt or honesty or love

matter to him now? Coming from the dead,

he would be something more or less than human,

something as cruel and hungry as a wolf.

How was I any different from him?

I came to death each day and sat beside it.

I breathed its musty odor in my lungs.

That was the night that I was born again,

not out of death, but into it—with him,

my poor unwitting savior in the well.

If I could only become strong enough,

I could do anything. I simply had

to tear away the comfortable lies,

the soft morality—the way a snake

sloughs skin when it becomes too small, the way

a wolf cub sheds its milkteeth for its fangs.

The next day when I saw a neighbor’s dog

sniffing around the well, I called him over.

I let him nuzzle me, then slit his throat.

I stuffed him full of rocks and threw him in.

I wanted to be sick, but I stayed strong.

Later I killed a cat and then another dog,

and when I heard two neighbors talk about

keeping their kids and pets inside at night

because a wolf had come down from the hills,

I had to smile. My new life had begun.

I started pulling petty robberies,

spaced months apart at first but then more often.

I never got caught though, except by her.

I’d come home late at night, and there she’d be

staring at me, so pious, old, and ugly—

although she didn’t guess the half of it.

So things went on like that until one night

they caught me cold, and I still had the gun.

VI.

In prison everyone’s a little crazy—

nothing to do and lots of time to do it.

So soon you either fasten on some memory

or lose your mind. Most guys just choose a woman

or a special place, but who knows what it takes

to make one thing stick in your mind for years?