Because even in death her eyes were the color of burnt sugar, her skin flawless and so smooth … I thought that I would tell Charlie—I will go back and skin her! Should I go back and skin her!

Because I was sure that Charlie would laugh and say—Yes! Go back and skin the slut and return to me wearing her skin, then I will love you above all the others because you are more beautiful than all of them.

Because this did not happen, and yet it is more real to me than many things that have happened.

As Charlie is more real to me than any of you.

Because we would tear out your throats with our teeth if we could.

Because it is ended now—my (last) parole hearing.

Because I leave you with my curse—DEATH TO PIGS.

INTIMACY

No reason to believe that he wishes you ill. That you are in danger.

No reason to think that as you speak carefully to him, respectfully, smiling your kind smile, he is not really listening, but staring at the movements of your mouth with an expression of muted rage.

No reason to believe that he is carrying, inside his loose-fitting clothes, partially zipped parka, khaki work pants with multiple pockets, or in the soiled canvas backpack on his knees, any sort of weapon.

Yet: you are alerted. Vigilant. Even as you instruct yourself No—of course not. Don’t be absurd.

You are an individual who prides herself on being enlightened. Calm, poised, inclined to compromise and arbitration. Not alarmist.

It’s the intimacy of the situation that is unnerving.

Intimacy—two individuals, middle-aged (female) professor, (male) student-writer/U.S. Army veteran in his late twenties, strangers to each other, finding themselves sharing a cramped space of approximately two hundred square feet in a basement university office.

Intimacy enhanced by the hour, which is late afternoon of an occluded November weekday, so that by five fifteen p.m. it is dusk outside the scummy half window of the office and the austere old sandstone building known as the Lyman Hall of Languages is near deserted.

Intimacy so stressful to you, your heartbeat has quickened, pinpricks of sweat are breaking out on your upper body beneath your clothes, though the air in the office is cold from the drafty, ill-fitting window.

Yet: no reason to believe that G***n K***f (as he has identified his writing-self on his manuscripts) is hostile to you specifically, still less that he will act upon this hostility, though the prose works of G***n K***f you have seen are steeped in violence, cruelty, sadism, and he has hinted to you, in a previous exchange, not in this office in the basement of Lyman Hall but in the corridor outside your seminar room on the third floor, that he has done some things, impulsive things of which I am not proud, Pro-fes-sor.