“I told you I was sorry. No. I’m not.”

“But you’re still going to get this Whatsisname.”

“Yes,” she said, “I am. In the best tradition of vigilantism, I’ve filled all the appointive offices myself: judge, jury, prosecutor, and she-who-pulls-the-trigger.”

“It’s a long time since the Big Bang,” I said uncertainly. I’d been almost at ease with her for a few minutes — or pleasurably uneasy, caught up in the heightened reality of verbal sparring. But her last declaration reminded me of the woman she’d been before she fell down.

“Sparrow, Tom Worecski is responsible for more deaths than Hitler. Does time wipe that clean? How much time? Does remorse? I don’t know if he’s sorry for murdering millions of people and making large areas of the Western Hemisphere uninhabitable, but tell me, how sorry ought he to be before I say, ‘Oh, never mind, I guess that makes it all right’?”

I stared at her, and she stared back. “Is that what I’m supposed to say when you apologize?” I asked.

She pressed her lips together. “Point to your side. But believe me, Tom has to die. And I have to do it. There’s no one else.”

“Chango, you could assemble a posse in five minutes if you told ’em what you wanted them for.”

“And shall I tell them how I come by my information? That I know Tom from way back, that we worked together, et cetera? No. There really is no one else.”

This time she didn’t sound as if she took pride in the fact. Or maybe the phrase meant something else, now. She sat staring at her strong hands crossed in her lap, as if images of the long, terrible, unchangeable past were shining up between her fingers.

I pumped the teakettle full of water and put it on the flame. Then I dumped the rest of the chamomile in my chipped enamel teapot and went back to the wing chair.

“Louisiana was wet,” I said. “And getting wetter.” I told the whole story without looking up. I had never told it to anyone. I’d been so careful never to even want to tell it that I’d mostly forgotten it myself. After all, no one else I knew remembered being born.

I’d heard the sound, rubbed my eyes, and recognized the hiss and bubble as running water before I’d seen anything. My vision had been slow to clear; the room revealed itself with each blink, each scrubbing pass with my fingers. The lighting was bluish and uneven. I was surrounded by metal boxes, large ones, with tops that caught the light: glass. I squinted past the reflections into the nearest one.

A dead, sunken face, a shaved head, a mummified naked body. There was a corpse in the box. There were eight boxes in the room, all alike. When, frightened, I turned my eyes away, I saw my own legs and feet, attached to the rest of me, bordered by a box with an open glass lid. I began to scream. I don’t know why; it was an instinct toward terror, a dread of being just like the eight dead things in the room. And of course I was, but for one small detail.