I tried to get away. I sucked in my belly until it was touching my back. I contracted my organs. I dropped my chest, endeavoring to get out from under him, but he put his hands around my neck, and he gradually began squeezing until I could no longer breathe.

“Why did you kill me, N, when you have no one besides me?”

All the air had left my lungs. I gripped his hands and strained to pull them off my neck. Then … I don’t know how I did it, but I found myself rising from the bed and backing toward the window. I stood there, catching my breath and massaging my neck. “I killed you because you are a killer!” I screamed. “Yes, you are a killer, and there was nothing to do but kill you!”

Luqman’s face darkened. His eyes wavered. Then he leapt upon me like a feral cat pouncing on its prey. He began kicking me and scratching me with his fingernails. I tried to fend him off, my back pressed against the table.

“You’re not real! You’re an illusion! Just as I created you, I can now end you!”

I reached a hand behind me, grasping for anything that might help me against him, while my other arm pressed against his chest to push him as far back as I could. But he only became more ferocious. He was bashing my nose and the sides of my head the way a person might strike a drum when trying to punch through it. Meanwhile, I flailed with my arms and feet, windmilling them through the air, until my hand fell upon the pencils that were behind me, newly sharpened and lying in their place beside the paper. I closed my hand on as many as I could, raised them up, and with all the strength I possessed, I hit him. I hit him again. And again.

Luqman’s eyes bulged out. He stopped struggling and his body arched back after the final blow landed in his solar plexus. I didn’t really believe I’d done him any serious harm until the moment he staggered back. His color had drained away, and he was pressing his hands to his belly as he fell to his knees, a broken man. I peered more closely and saw that the bundle of wooden pencils had entered deep into his soft skin. Blood was spreading in a large stain across his belly, with a second near the top of his chest.

I got down close to him and helped him to the floor, leaning his back against the bed. Then I sat beside him. I was trembling from fatigue and the shock of what had happened. It occurred to me to go to the door and start pounding and screaming until people arrived and saved him, but he took hold of me, begging me not to tell anyone because they would hurt us both. He pleaded for me to remain there with him until we found some solution. All of a sudden, he was drawing my hand toward him so that I could pull the pencils out of his belly, which I did. They were warm to the touch, anointed with blood.