I looked down at him, so passively taped and ready for my special attentions, and I should have been filled with icy delight at the job ahead of me-and I was not. I was not filled with anything except emptiness, the same feeling of hopeless futility that had come over me while I waited outside the house.

I shook myself out of the funk and taped Starzak's mouth shut. He flinched a little, but other than that he continued to look straight away, with no show of any kind of emotion.

I raised my knife and looked down at my unmoving and unmoved prey. I could still hear his awful wet breath rattling in and out through his nostrils and I wanted to stop it, turn out his lights, shut down this noxious thing, cut it into pieces and seal them into neat dry garbage bags, unmoving chunks of compost that would no longer threaten, no longer eat and excrete and flail around in the patternless maze of human life

And I could not.

I called silently for the familiar rush of dark wings to sweep out of me and light up my knife with the wicked gleam of savage purpose, and nothing came. Nothing moved within me at the thought of doing this sharp and necessary thing I had done so happily so many times. The only thing that welled up inside me was emptiness.

I lowered the knife, turned away, and walked out into the night.

TWENTY-FOUR

S OMEHOW I PULLED MYSELF OUT OF BED AND WENT IN TO work the next day, in spite of the gnawing sense of dull despair that bloomed in me like a brittle garden of thorns. I felt wrapped in a fog of dull pain that hurt only enough to remind me that it, too, was without purpose, and there seemed no point to going through the empty motions of breakfast, the long slow drive to work, no reason at all beyond the slavery of habit. But I did it, allowing muscle memory to push me all the way into the chair at my desk, where I sat, turned on the computer, and let the day drag me off into gray drudgery.

I had failed with Starzak. I was no longer me, and had no idea who or what I was.
Rita was waiting for me at the door when I got home with a look of anxious annoyance on her face. "We need to decide about the band," she said. "They may already be booked."
"All right," I said. Why not decide about bands? It was as meaningful as anything else.
"I picked up all the CDs from where you dropped them yesterday," she said, "and sorted them by price."